ADM vs Cargill

Yesterday my friends and I were leaving Santa Barbara to begin the 275 mile drive home. Our 8 person convoy included two vegcars - my '84 300D and Josh's 83 300SD. I started the trip with a full tank of WVO and brought along 15 extra gallons but didn't think it would be quite enough to get home. So we stopped in at Costco Santa Barbara to buy some soybean oil.

The usual oil that we have seen at Costco is the 100% soybean oil manufactured by ADM (Archer Daniels Midland). Josh and I always had a bit of an issue buying oil from a company that paid more than $500 million in fines for price fixing violaitions, receives huge government subsidies, and for their widespread use of gmo's (genetically modified organisms).

When we got to the vegetable oil aisle at Costco we noticed that the packaging was a bit different on the soybean oil. The price was also a bit higher - $13.59 instead of the recent $12.99 for a 35 lb. container (just under 5 gallons). Josh noticed that the brand was Kirkland and said, "cool, it's not ADM." We examined the box more closely and saw that this Kirkland oil was manufactured by Cargill - the largest privately owned US corporation - accused of promoting massive deforestation in the Amazon. Ah, the joys of living in the post-corporate world!

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