A growing number of consumers in the United States have some sense of the violence of the palm oil industry. Decades of NGO ad copy and half heard speechifying have resulted in an inkling, a vague feeling, that palm oil — the substance derived from the African oil palm — is somehow bad. Bad in the way of sugar (addictive?), sugar-free sodas (carcinogenic?), e-commerce (environmentally and economically devastating?), and social media (where to even begin?). Bad, but in a far-off way, a danger that is sensed more than felt, and surely felt much more acutely over there. Something that, if we just had more time or money, we would avoid.

Naturally, this suspicion undersells how bad the industry actually is. In Indonesia, Malaysia, and other places where the oil palm is grown and processed, entire families (including children) are forced to undertake backbreaking labor, under horrifying conditions, for minimal pay. Deforestation, spurred in large part by the palm oil industry, is a climatological catastrophe of such proportions that it has resulted in the emergence of an entirely new annual season: “haze.”

This deforestation has also led to the displacement of indigenous peoples, the devastation of a panoply of endangered species, and accounts for an astonishing 6 percent of global carbon emissions. Historically, palm oil was the lubricant of the industrial revolution and the global war machine, key to the creation of dynamite and napalm. Perhaps it’s fitting that, before it’s processed, palm oil is bloodred.