May I Have a Chimpanzee Finger, Please?

Nestlé is a company that has a very high reputation in almost every country where its products are sold. At least that was what I used to think until we saw in our French class a video that showed what Nestlé did with the Indonesian forests. In order to produce Kit Kat chocolates, Nestlé needs palm oil. They need to plant multiple acres of these palms to have enough oil to make those Kit Kats. What Nestlé did, was deforesting the woods from Indonesia where chimpanzees live and plat their millions of palms.

As expected, Greenpeace reacted in a defensive manner. They created a video clip that was a plagiarism of the Kit Kat commercial in which they highlighted what Nestlé was doing. The video consist of a guy opening a Kit Kat wrapper and taking out a piece of chocolate that was actually the finger of a chimpanzee. When the guy eats it, blood starts to come out of the finger and then, it is all over the place. Disgusting, I know. Even though the video was a little shocking, it was truthful.

The reaction of Nestlé was as expected; they didn’t like it at all. Their image of a social compromised company was damaged. After all the trouble they were put into, they decided to start using a substitute of the palm oil for an artificial one.

Does the end justify the means? In this case, it’s clearly that satisfying our whishes (eating chocolate) does not worth to kill the environment of a very important being for the world, such as the chimpanzee. It is really hard for me to understand how big companies like Nestlé don’t measure the consequences of their actions, and they just act selfishly.


Francis Bacon, an English philosopher of the Renaissance, once said: “Nature, to be controlled, must be obeyed”. I should think more often about it…

Deforestation

A definition for deforestation is described as the clearance of natural forests by the process of human logging or burning of trees and plants in a forested area. Truly it is more than this; people do not realize that when they destroy all these trees and plants around us they are really slowly destroying themselves.

Many people do not know the importance of trees on earth, they cut them down and cut them down without thinking of the consequences, the only thing they ever think about is how big the buildings are going to be and how much more trees they need to chop down so they can have enough space for their construction. Trees and plants are vital for our survival, the provide oxygen to humans and all living creatures. They are important because they keep a balance in nature, without them we would not be able to survive long, especially in the contaminated world we live in.

Besides giving us such an important thing as oxygen (which we cannot live without), plants provide us many types of foods, sometimes shelter including furniture, different medicines and rains. But with the cutting of so many trees and so little of them being planted, we will soon have no trees to give us all that that has been mentioned.

As I said, plants keep balance in the ecosystem, without them animals would have no were to live, no were to go and nothing to eat. Soon they would start dying and leaving us with fewer animals than what there is now a days, which would eventually affect us in so many ways we cannot even imagine. So, we should start to become a bit more conscientious about our actions and start to take more care of the world we live in.