Sesame pods burst open on their own, and farming still fights it
Ripe sesame capsules split and fling their seeds, and they do not all ripen at once. So farmers cut the plants by hand and stand them upright until every pod has popped. A non-shattering mutant turned up in 1943, yet decades of breeding have not fully solved the problem for one of humanity's oldest oil crops.
Charred seeds dated to about 3500 to 3050 BC show that Sesamum indicum was domesticated on the Indian subcontinent, and its species name simply means of India. Most wild relatives live in sub-Saharan Africa. By 2000 BC sesame was traded between India and Mesopotamia, where the Sumerian word for its oil, ilu, resembles Tamil el and Kannada ellu. Egyptians listed it in the Ebers Papyrus around 1550 BC, and baskets of it lay among Tutankhamun's grave goods.
The English word traces through Latin and Greek to Akkadian shamashshamu, from roots meaning oil or liquid fat. Benne, its other English name, was first recorded in 1769 and came via Gullah from the Malinke word bene. Enslaved West Africans brought the seeds to colonial America in the seventeenth century and grew the plant to stretch meagre rations, using seeds to thicken soups, roasting them into a coffee-like drink, and pressing oil to replace butter.
The breeder Derald Ray Langham called sesame a survivor crop, because it tolerates drought, heat and failed or excessive rains, and grows at desert edges where little else will. Its long roots help. Seeds are tiny, 100 of them from a Nigerian market weighing about 0.2 grams, and they must be stored at 6 percent moisture or less or they heat up and go rancid. Longer day length raises oil content, which rises as protein falls.
World output reached 6.7 million tonnes in 2024, with India, Myanmar and Sudan together providing a third. Japan imports more than any other country, valuing roasted sesame oil in its cooking. In early twentieth-century Europe, sesame oil was mandatory in margarine because it made margarine easy to detect when used to adulterate butter. Pale seeds dominate in Europe and the Americas, dark ones in China and Southeast Asia.
Source: Sesame
