the.com/cottonseed
the fuzzy afterthought of clothes that secretly feeds your cattle and fries your fries
means The small seed of the cotton plant, left over after the fibers are removed, valued for its oil and as livestock feed.
from A plain English compound of "cotton" and "seed." "Cotton" arrived through Old French "coton" from Arabic "qutn" (قطن), a reminder that the plant and its trade traveled westward through the Arabic-speaking world before the word ever met the homely Old English "sǣd." So the name itself is a small history of cotton's journey: an Arabic traveler bolted onto a native English root.
- toxic twin
- Raw seeds carry gossypol, poisonous to most animals
- cattle fuel
- Ruminants shrug off the toxin and eat it daily
- hidden oil
- Cottonseed oil fried chips long before vegetable oils
- two crops
- Each plant yields both fiber and edible seed
- gossypol drug
- Once studied as a male birth-control pill
cottonseed oil — edible oil extracted from cotton seeds, major cooking oil in china and india
gossypol — toxic compound in cottonseed that must be removed before feeding to livestock
cottonseed meal — protein-rich byproduct used as livestock feed, containing 41% crude protein