amount of the oil of the sesame seed is required by the laws of Germany and Denmark because it can be easily detected by a chemical color test and so serves to prevent the margarin containing it from being sold as butter.  “Open sesame!” is the password to these markets.  Remembering that margarin originally was made up entirely of animal fats, soft and hard, we can see from the above figures how rapidly they are being displaced by the vegetable fats.  The cottonseed and peanut oils have replaced the original oleo oil and the tropical oils from the coconut (copra) and African palm are crowding out the animal hard fats.  Since now we can harden at will any of the vegetable oils it is possible to get along altogether without animal fats.  Such vegetable margarins were originally prepared for sale in India, but proved unexpectedly popular in Europe, and are now being introduced into America.  They are sold under various trade names suggesting their origin, such as “palmira,” “palmona,” “milkonut,” “cocose,” “coconut oleomargarin” and “nucoa nut margarin.”  The last named is stated to be made of coconut oil (for the hard fat) and peanut oil (for the soft fat), churned up with a culture of pasteurized milk (to impart the butter flavor).  The law requires such a product to be branded “oleomargarine” although it is not.  Such cases of compulsory mislabeling are not rare.  You remember the “Pigs is Pigs” story.

Peanut butter has won its way into the American menu without any camouflage whatever, and as a salad oil it is almost equally frank about its lowly origin.  This nut, which grows on a vine instead of a tree, and is dug from the ground like potatoes instead of being picked with a pole, goes by various names according to locality, peanuts, ground-nuts, monkey-nuts, arachides and goobers.  As it takes the place of cotton oil in some of its products so it takes its place in the fields and oilmills of Texas left vacant by the bollweevil.  The once despised peanut added some $56,000,000 to the wealth of the South in 1916.  The peanut is rich in the richest of foods, some 50 per cent. of oil and 30 per cent. of protein.  The latter can be worked up into meat substitutes that will make the vegetarian cease to envy his omnivorous neighbor.  Thanks largely to the chemist who has opened these new fields of usefulness, the peanut-raiser got $1.25 a bushel in 1917 instead of the 30 cents that he got four years before.

It would be impossible to enumerate all the available sources of vegetable oils, for all seeds and nuts contain more or less fatty matter and as we become more economical we shall utilize of what we now throw away.  The germ of the corn kernel, once discarded in the manufacture of starch, now yields a popular table oil.  From tomato seeds, one of the waste products of the canning factory, can be extracted 22 per cent. of an edible oil.  Oats contain 7 per cent. of oil.  From rape seed the Japanese get 20,000 tons of oil a year.  To the sources previously mentioned may be added pumpkin seeds, poppy seeds, raspberry seeds, tobacco seeds, cockleburs, hazelnuts, walnuts, beechnuts and acorns.