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Mustard (sarisa) herbs that give oil from its
seeds, such as Brassica napus (rape), and Brassica nigra
(black mustard), of the family Cruciferae. Only a few decades ago, mustard
oil was the exclusive cooking oil in Bangladesh. The oil, still in many
places, is squeezed from the seeds by using traditional grinding mills,
called 'Ghanee', which is pulled by a bull through long hours of the day
and even throughout the night; the tradesman in the business is called
'Kolu'.
So monotonous was the bull's work that the term 'Kolu's bull'
became an innuendo to describe someone doing routine monotonous
work without questioning or wanting to know why he is doing or
what he is doing. Nowadays, mustard oil extraction is done in
electric mills.
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A mustard crop field |
Courtesy:
Noazesh Ahmed |
At present about 0.33 million hectares of land are put
to mustard cultivation in Bangladesh with yield of mustard oil in the
order of 0.22 million m tons per year. This quantity meets only a fraction
of the country's cooking oil needs. Therefore, large quantity of soybean
and sunflower oil is to be imported. Imported soybean oil is cheaper than
local mustard oil, which has been further reducing mustard acreage in
the country. Although mustard is grown in almost all the districts, Chittagong,
Sylhet, Dhaka, Tangail, Jessore, Bogra, Sirajganj, and Pabna have comparatively
higher acreage of land for cultivation of this Rabi crop. [Zia Uddin Ahmed]
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