the.com/cotton
a fluffy seed bodyguard that quietly clothes half the planet and started wars
means A soft, fluffy fiber that grows around the seeds of the cotton plant, spun and woven into one of the world's most common fabrics.
from From Arabic 'quṭn,' the word traveled with the cloth itself — across the Mediterranean into Spanish 'algodón' and Italian 'cotone,' arriving in English (via Old French 'coton') in the Middle Ages. The plant and its name moved together along trade routes, so the European word is a souvenir of where the fiber first reached merchants.
- actually fruit
- The fluff protects seeds, making cotton a botanical dispersal trick
- thirsty crop
- One t-shirt costs roughly 2,700 liters of water
- war fuel
- Slavery and the cotton gin reshaped American history together
- money paper
- US dollars are mostly cotton, not wood pulp
- ancient threads
- Cotton fabric dates back over 7,000 years
mississippi delta — produces ~1.5 million bales annually, historically the world's cotton heartland
xinjiang region china — produces 85% of china's cotton, ~5.5 million metric tons in 2021
india cotton production — world's largest cotton grower by area, ~6 million metric tons annually