The cotton balls we use to make clothes are actually the fluff on cottonseed, which can be used to make all kinds of clothes. But what many people don't know is that cottonseed is high in fat and can be used to squeeze high-quality cottonseed oil.
Cottonseed oil is high in unsaturated fatty acids and has no peculiar smell. It is a very high-quality and healthy vegetable oil. It is rich in vitamin E and has good oxidation resistance. When used for frying food, it is more resistant to frying than ordinary soybean oil and rapeseed oil, so it is widely used in food industry.
But in recent decades, cottonseed oil can be used for food processing, because the freshly squeezed cottonseed oil is toxic and contains a substance called gossypol. Gossypol is an insecticide secreted by cotton, which is used to prevent cotton from being damaged by pests. It is precisely because cotton can secrete gossypol that they are not vulnerable to pests.
However, with the development of science and technology, the removal of gossypol from cottonseed oil has become a very mature process. It is found that gossypol will combine with amino acids after adding amino acids to cottonseed oil, and become a non-toxic precipitate, so it is easy to remove gossypol. Of course, modern biotechnology can also use RNA interference to make cotton unable to produce gossypol from the beginning.
Distribution of cotton producing areas in China
China is the largest cotton producer in the world. The cotton planting belt is roughly distributed at 18 -46 degrees north latitude and 76-124 degrees east longitude, that is, it starts from Hainan Island in the south, reaches Manas reclamation area in Xinjiang in the north, starts from Taiwan Province Province, the coastal areas of the Yangtze River Delta and Liaohe River Basin in the east, and reaches the western edge of Tarim Basin in Xinjiang in the west.
Except Tibet, Qinghai, Inner Mongolia, Heilongjiang, Jilin and a few other provinces (autonomous regions), cotton can be planted all over the country. There are 22 cotton-producing provinces and cities and 7 cotton fields with an area of over 400,000 hectares (Xinjiang, Henan, Jiangsu, Hubei, Shandong, Hebei and Anhui); There are four (Hunan, Jiangxi, Sichuan and Shanxi) with an area of 65438+ 10,000 hectares. Other provinces and cities only have sporadic planting.