Terri Johnson, age 10, of Montoursville, Pennsylvania, for her question:

What is palm oil?

The generous palm trees bestow many gifts. They provide mankind with shade, with tasty nuts and sweet fruits, with nourishing starches and green vegetables, with fragrant oils and buttery fats. They also provide fibrous materials for weaving baskets and making cloth    and tougher materials for building fences, walls and shady roofs. More than 2,600 different kinds of palm tree grow in, the warm parts of the world.

The coconut grows on a palm tree and its crunchy nut meat contains a lot of light, tasty oil. It is crushed out of the meat and used as salad and cooking oil. Some coconut oil is processed to make saps and rich face creams. Other palms yield oil. But the most generous one is the palm oil tree that grows in West Africa. It bears clusters of sweet fruit, somewhat like dark red dates. When the fleshy part of the fruit is boiled, it yields palm oil. When the hard kernels are crushed, they yield thick white fat that makes splendid margarine.