Historical Notes on Cotton Seed as Food

Commercial utilization of cotton seed dates back to the middle of the nineteenth century, when the oil was first successfully expressed. Up to that time the cultivation of the cotton plant was for the cotton alone, the seeds being left to decay and yield fertilizer. One of the very early attempts to make use of the oil from the cotton plant was that of the Antilles of the British West Indies (Du Tertre, 1667) who made oil from the flower of the cotton plant and used it as a medicament for old ulcers. It was one hundred years or more before people began to investigate the various oleaginous seeds and to devise methods for dividing them into the oil and the oil cake. One of the first endeavors was that of the Moravians (Bishop, 1866) at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, who, in 1769-1770, gave exhibits of specimens of oil which they had made from various oleaginous seeds. Among the exhibits was a sample of cotton seed oil that they had expressed from the decorticated seeds" at the rate of nine pints of oil to a bushel-and-a-half of seeds. At the same time a sample of the oil was preset]ted to the American Philosophical Society for the purpose of emphasizing the worth of the cotton seeds in their oil content.