Peanut

Scientific

Arachis hypogaea (family Fabaceae) is geocarpic — the fertilized flower bends downward and the developing fruit (“peg”) is pushed into [[soil|the soil]], where the pods mature underground. This is unusual among legumes and explains the “[[groundnut|groundnut]]” common name across Africa and South Asia.

Seeds contain ~25% protein and ~50% oil — the second-highest oil content among cultivated legumes after [[soybean|soybean]] (when measured per dry seed mass).

Cultural and historical

The Andean domestication was thousands of years before Columbian contact; archaeological peanut remains in coastal Peru go back to 7,000+ years ago. Portuguese trade carried the species from Brazil to West Africa in the 1500s, where it integrated rapidly into existing [[groundnut|groundnut]]-adapted agricultural systems (the African Vigna [[groundnut|groundnut]] was the closest pre-existing analog).

The Atlantic slave trade then carried the species — and its West African culinary tradition — into the American South, where [[george-washington-carver|George Washington Carver]]‘s late-19th-century work at Tuskegee Institute produced hundreds of peanut-based products and made the crop economically central to Southern Black agriculture.

Global production

Top producers: China, India, Nigeria, USA, Sudan. Roughly half of global production is crushed for peanut oil; the rest is eaten as the bean (boiled, roasted, ground into peanut butter, processed into snacks).

See also

Auto-generated from this entry’s typed relations: frontmatter, grouped by relation type so the editorial signal isn’t flattened.

• Enables: [[food-sovereignty]]
• Shares approach with: [[cotton]] · [[sweet-potato]]
• Parallels: [[abundance]]
• Member of: [[plants]]
• Cousin of: [[soybean]] · [[common-bean]] · [[chickpea]] · [[lentil]]
• Practices: [[agroforestry]]

Sources

• FAO Crop Statistics
• Wikipedia — Peanut

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A plant entry in the 0mn1.one [[directory]].