Hexan (sp?) is the material used to process a great deal food oil and flours as in South American soy production. Soy is in a tremendous amount of food products that no one know has been for sure cooked in Hexan! I tried hard to find out if the coconut flour I purchased was created this way but since processing for extraction of flours/oils etc are often done in the country of origin…… in coconuts case the Philippines, companies are keen to be private about cooking ground material in chemicals, skimming off the oils, steaming off the petro chems and drying the resulting flours.

The traditional style of distillation being much more costly makes pure oils not so cooked…. much harder to find to buy. Worse my research has been that USA organic cert FDA standards do not generally cover processing, only growing.

In the 1960’s-70s the west end of the Boise Idaho valley was known for vast mint fields. The field near my family ranch were ‘weeded’ by fenced-in geese. A symbiosis (experiment?) that if the geese wanted food they had to search out the the few green weeds that grew among the mat of mature mint vegetation. Harvest quality depended on single plant material once cut to distill. Purity of no pesticides made a career for the geese who were likely kept pretty hungry long before animal welfare!

The hot dry climate and long growing season made the area a major producer of ‘peppermint oil’ that went mainly into the toothpaste, chewing gum, etc manf. The breeze filled with the smell of the huge outdoor stills at the end of the summer, heat processing the mint harvest. This was long before the ‘economy of scale’ by chemical processes moved the production off shore. Interestingly the smell was not a ‘nice’ mint smell more of a cooked arid stink, likely from the hot waste heaps of plant material.

I spoke with a man collecting the harvest from the various location that had the specialist stills (used only for that crop). He was driving a pickup truck with 4-50 gal steel barrels of pure mint oil he was transporting. I have no memory of what aprox price it was going to realize but it was truly shocking.

Mints are a huge family and a very common wild plant to find out in nature usually in moist locations but also high on the mt side and leafy top stems foraged responsibly recover yearly as it is strong perennial. Any fresh stem of any mint put in water will shoot roots and can be planted. Children introduced to the smell and taste of wild mint is nearly full proof safe. Besides characteristic taste, all mint family stems rolled between the thumb and fore finger will have a square stem! Ethically collecting leaves to make campfire tea or harvested to dry (till they crumble) and stored in light and air proof glass, is always a good experience to share easy gifts to give away.

Mint is strong powerful stuff, with an enormous amount of social and medical history. But I had better not go on.

SpockDaughter
10 miles ‘by crow’ from Stonehenge