Your Next Cooking Oil Could Come From Hemp
Hemp Industrial hemp production in France. Aleks via Wikimedia Commons Agricultural hemp produces strong and decay-resistant fibers, a versatile oil, and requires little in the way of herbicides, since it outcompetes weeds. Hemp oil isn't widely used for cooking, though, partially because it turns rancid swiftly if not refrigerated. Now genetic researchers have developed a new version of hemp that produces an oil similar to olive oil in terms of its fatty acid content (specifically, containing a large proportion of oleic acid), and which lasts seven times longer than the product from the unmodified plant. The new strain was produced by using genetic techniques to disable two genes involved in the production of polyunsaturated fatty acids, and thus the plant produces more mono-unsaturated fats like oleic acid. This is an omega-9 fatty acid,...