Have you ever thought about sesame seeds? I mean, have you really thought about them? They are everywhere! We eat them all the time, they are on pretty much every burger you have ever eaten, they go on our bagels and on our crackers. I mean, it has even been reported that the tomb of Tutankhamen had sesame seeds inside! We have sesame oil which comes from sesame seeds, and they are in a whole lot of other foods that would take up this entire article if I were to list them all! But the question is, where in the world do they come from?
A friend of my recently asked me as we had a very serious discussion about this, “Have you ever actually seen a sesame seed plant?” As I thought about it I realized that no, I haven’t. I’ve seen apple trees, and fig trees, I’ve seen pumpkins and tomatoes growing, but I’ve never seen a sesame plant. As a matter of fact the more I thought about it I realized that I had no idea even what kind of plant sesame seeds grew on! Or perhaps they were some kind of government conspiracy inconspicuously added to all of our food for whatever dastardly plan, because that would be the perfect plan. So as I always do I decided to look into it, and found that even though it isn’t anything as action packed as some kind of government conspiracy, that sesame seeds still have a pretty interesting past.
Sesame seeds were actually one of the first condiments, dating back some 5,000 years ago! Its oil was also burned back then and used a light source, at the same time the oil was used for cooking as we use it today. The use of sesame plants is so old that there is even an Assyrian myth that that when the gods came together to create the world, they drank wine from sesame seeds. As you can see, sesame seeds have played an important role in cultures for thousands of years.
As for where in the world sesame seeds come from nowadays, it turns out that they come from small plants that are grown in five million acres around the world. India seems to have claim to the largest growing area in the world, although a large amount comes from Africa as well. In the United States the reason why we don’t see it much, if at all is because only have around fifteen thousand acres growing it, and then primarily in Texas, although a few other southern states grow it as well.
So the mystery of the sesame seeds has been solved. We now know that it isn’t as big of a mystery as we thought, it just so happens that we never really think about that kind of stuff, so we don’t really know anything about them. However we can say that now that we have looked into it a little bit, here is one more unknown subject we can now say doesn’t keep us up at night anymore.
