Safflower

An oilseed crop, Carthamus tinctorius, among the oldest crops cultivated by humans, grown in the Fertile Crescent and ancient Egypt for millennia. For most of its long history safflower was grown primarily for the orange-red dye extracted from its flowers, used to color textiles and, in ancient Egypt, found in the wrappings of mummies, rather than for its seed oil, which became the crop's dominant commercial use only in the twentieth century as synthetic dyes displaced natural ones. Safflower is now grown chiefly for its oil, valued for its high content of unsaturated fat, with production concentrated in India, the United States, Mexico and parts of Central Asia.