ough 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.

The oil-bearing seeds of the tropics are innumerable and will become
increasingly essential to the inhabitants of northern lands. It was the
realization of this that brought on the struggle of the great powers
for the possession of tropical territory which, for years before, they
did not think worth while raising a flag over. No country in the future
can consider itself safe unless it has secure access to such sources. We
had a sharp lesson in this during the war. Palm oil, it seems, is
necessary for the manufacture of tinplate, an industry that was built up
in the United States by the McKinley tariff. The British possessions in
West Af