The oil that built the American seed-oil industry — a cheap byproduct of cotton, and the original base of Crisco. Its story is the plantation economy and the seed-oil severance in one bottle.
Cottonseed oil is inseparable from the cotton economy that enslaved and then sharecropped Black labor — the same crop, its waste seed turned into the fat that flooded Black Southern kitchens and fast food.
Cottonseed oil is roughly half omega-6 linoleic acid and around a quarter saturated palmitic acid — a fatty-acid profile that, consumed in the quantities the American diet now delivers, tilts the body toward inflammation. Crude cottonseed contains gossypol, a toxic pigment that must be refined out; the heavy processing required to make it edible strips it of much benefit. It carries no meaningful ancestral or therapeutic value here — it is included as documentation of the severance, not as a recommendation. The shift from animal fats and red palm oil to cottonseed and its descendants is the molecular fingerprint of the industrialization of the Black Southern diet.
Used industrially for frying and in processed and fried foods; high smoke point. Not recommended as a household cooking oil given better monounsaturated alternatives.
Free, no account needed to ask.