Can This Unassuming Little Desert Shrub Really Save The World?

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The extraction part wasn't too difficult ... but the harvesting of the wild jojoba's oil-laden nuts was something else again. The shrubs frequently grow ten feet high and ten feet in diameter ... and the whole mass is often—in the words of The Jojoba Research Foundation—"a mass of tangled woody branches".

Picking the plant's nuts, in other words, can be a decidedly labor-intensive proposition. And once the war was over, most of us seemed to lose interest in doing anything so menial as hand-gathering the nuts from a shrub somewhere out in the hot, dry desert for crying out loud ... especially when it was so much easier (and a lot more macho!) to just harpoon a few whales and render the special oil we needed out of them.

The only trouble was-as the late-40's turned into the 50's and then the 60's and, finally, the early-70's, and the world's weapons and tractors and earth movers and other machines became ever bigger, more numerous, and more sophisticated- everyone's thirst for high-pressure lubricants became more and more insatiable as time went on. And those "few" whales that we started out to kill soon threatened to become merely all the sperm whales in the sea.

And thus it is that now-with his back against the wall and virtually no where else to turn-homo sapiens has finally "discovered" the patient jojoba plant and cleverly surmised that it might be a darned good idea if he (in his infinite wisdom) explored the possibilities of cultivating the shrub for its oil-rich nuts. (When all else fails, do what you obviously shoulda done in the f irst place!)

And those nuts are rich in oil. Most jojoba seeds test out at between 45 to 60 percent ... with the average nut running close to 50 percent clear, unsaturated, resin- and tar- and alkaloid- and glyceride-free oil. Furthermore, the fluid has a high viscosity index, high flash and fire points, high dielectric constant, and a pleasant smell ... and seems to be so stable and resistant to oxidation that it can be stored for years—decades!—without ever becoming rancid.

Jojoba oil has even more desirable characteristics ... far too many, in fact, to list here. Suffice it to say that the fluid is an ideal (the only ideal) substitute for sperm oil when it comes to the highly specialized lubricating products we've already mentioned. It also appears to be the only readily available source of straight-chain mono- unsaturated alcohols and acids. This and other unique properties of the oil seem destined to make the jojoba- now that we've finally begun to give it serious considerationextremely important to our food, leather, paint, adhesives, cleaning and polishing, cosmetics, health, insulation, rubber, textile, and other industries in the future. Research has even shown that one derivative of the jojoba seed- sim mondsin— tends to act as an appetite suppressant in mono-gastric (singlestomach) animals. No one yet knows why ... but scientists are already speculating about a highprotein, entirely natural "diet" pill made from the jojoba nut!

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