Flowers vs. Those Who Eat Their Young
FATHER AFIELD
Tom Willey
T & D Willey Farms
Animals eating seed, the grains in our daily bread included, is not exactly in the best interest of plants, which produce them for the purpose of reproduction. So has ensued an eons-old cat and mouse game between flowering botanical species and those who would eat their young in embryonic form. Tricksters that they are, plants offering floral nectars entice animals to provide vital pollination service and to disperse seeds, lured by delicious digestible fruits within which reside those vital germs of life, cleverly protected from becoming a meal for others. Many seeds resist digestion but are uniquely enhanced by a journey through an animal’s gut to germinate.
Some seeds taste unpleasantly bitter, still others are protected by plants manufacturing some of the deadliest poisons known; ricin, cyanide, strychnine and in the case of cotton, gossypol. Though the long familiar genus, Gossypium, native to several continents, has been domesticated some seven thousand years for its versatile fiber, cotton has stubbornly denied humans its seed as food. Farmers in our antebellum South saved a small fraction of seeds for replanting and crushed some for use as fertilizer. However valuable, oil and protein contents of cottonseed were largely ignored for almost a century following the 1794 invention of Whitney’s gin.
Enormous amounts of seed were carelessly discarded as waste, creating serious environmental problems. Post-civil war, oil crushed from cottonseed gradually became valuable industrially, further advances in its refinement were later adopted, guised as Wesson Oil and Crisco, into America’s kitchens. High protein (24%) cottonseed meal however, stubbornly holds onto poisonous gossypol and can only be tolerated by ruminant animals at low levels in carefully managed diets. Chickens exclusively fed the otherwise valuable meal expire from its toxicity in a week. Efforts to eliminate gossypol from cotton plants employed classical breeding methods in the 1950’s and met success but resulting varieties, no longer able to defend themselves, were invariably ravaged by pests and disease.
A freshly announced breakthrough in excluding gossypol from just the seeds is being achieved by Texas A & M researcher Keerti Rathore who exploits a 2006 Nobel Prize-awarded genetic engineering technique known as RNA interference. If approved for human consumption, gossypol-free cottonseed meal could eventually supply protein needs for 500 million people, but most will likely find its way into domestic animal rations. Some plants’ seed protection measures were rather easily foiled, as with common beans, by the ancient invention of cooking; others like almonds when humans long ago domesticated rare mutant trees that failed to express poison. Cotton, collaborating otherwise with humans over millennia, has until the present most cleverly refused to feed us. –Tom Willey
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