Canola oil flowers - four or five petals? Ask Trader Joe...

Canola oil is made from the rape seed plant's (several Brassica species) oil rich seeds, a member of the mustard family, the Brassicaceae.  Members of this family can easily be identified by their very typical flowers.  They have 4 petals, often white, yellow, or pink, situated in a cross-wise fashion, which gave them the old family name Cruciferae.  Yes, that is the same word beginning as in crucifix, a cross.

Brassicaceae flowers also have 6 stamens, and a central pistil that will develop into a fruit when/if pollinated.  All mustard plants have the same types of flowers, be it broccoli, garlic mustard, cabbage, arugula, or kohlrabi.  But there is one place, where the rule doesn't hold up...

Canola Oil Spray at Trader Joe's.
(cc) BotanicalAccuracy.com

On the Trader Joe's Canola Oil Spray bottle, sold only at the Trader Joe's supermarket, they have nicely added some flowers from the canola oil plant to the label. Only the flowers look like this:

Close up of Canola Oil Spray cans at Trader Joe's.
(cc) BotanicalAccuracy.com

So, what do we have here?  One flower with four petals (good!), and one flower with five petals (oops!).  And inside each flower, there are three 'things'.   I assume these might be stamens or pistils, but neither makes sense based on the numbers or shapes. The flowers are also never arranged in this particular fashion, but that is a minor point.

So, who cares? Well, if you make a piece of art you certainly can and should have artistic freedom. But, if you illustrate a product, the illustration should provide some knowledge (or excitement) or identification value about the product. It should be the real thing and not introduce errors or misunderstandings into the public's knowledge of plants and the product source.

The number of petals on mustard flowers are strictly determined by that group's bauplan, just like the 4 legs of a dog is based on a strict bauplan among allmammals. You don't go around and see a 5-legged dogs, do you? (5-legged dogs do exist, but are mutants, and they are even rarer in art.)

Here is the real canola:

Flowering canola plant. 
(cc)  Melanie_B (Flying Snow) on Flickr.

So, in this case, the flowers on the label are used to illustrated the origin of a product, canola oil from the canola plant. There are no canola oil flowers with 5 petals. There are no canola oil flowers with 3 non-descript things in the center of the flowers.  If this drawing had been made with 4 petals it would have been equally pretty, and also accurate. So you start to wonder where things went wrong, with the illustrator, with the description to the illustrator, or to the designer of the label?

The oily shea-butter tree, should it be Butyrospermum parkii or Vitellaria paradoxa?

The shea-butter tree is a very popular source of a vegetable fat in Africa (more information at Agrifostree). This fat, called shea butter, is now exported and used in many cosmetics products worldwide.

Preparation of Shea butter.
(cc) David Fulmer on Flickr.

Cosmetics and other skin products that include shea butter lists it as  'Butyrospermum Parkii (Shea Butter)', following the INCI database of registered names of cosmetics ingredients.  (As usual, parkii should of course not be capitalized, as pointed out earlier.)

But if you look up the scientific name of the shea-butter tree in current botanical databases, the old Butyrospermum name has changed, and this species is now called Vitellaria paradoxa.  The tree is a member of the Sapotaceae family, famous for its soaping abilities.  The species has two older synonyms in the Butyrospermum genus, B. paradoxum and B. parkii (link). So why isn't INCI updated?  Because there has been a disconnect between the botanical taxonomic world, and the world of plant ingredients in commercial products. 

Shea Butter on LUSH's webpage.
Screen capture by BotanicalAccuracy.com

So companies like LUSH have to use the old, outdated name for this species instead of listing its updated and corrected new name until INCI has updated its database. The same is true for many other plant-derived ingredients that are included in the INCI database.  INCI is working on this, but it will take a while.

So, in summary, the scientific facts for the shea butter plant:

Correct scientific name:  Vitellaria paradoxa

Incorrect name:  Butyrospermum parkii

Apple's Siri ad: wrong poison oak

Ad for Siri and iPhone 4 in The Economist. 
Photo by Vilseskogen on Flickr, Creative Commons license.

In July 2012 Apple ran a print-ad featuring their new iPhone 4S and its Siri answering system, featuring the question "What does poison oak look like?" The photo above is from the ad printed on the back of the magazine The Economist.

The problem is that the answer Siri gave in the ad is not correct. That is not how poison oak (Toxicodendron diversilobum) looks like, that is how poison ivy (Toxicodendron radicans) looks like. Both are members of the Anacardiaceae family, which also includes mango, pistachio, cashew and rose pepper. There are also several other species of Toxicodendron in North America, all of them toxic.

In fact, the photo shown in the ad is the photo of poison ivy from Wikipedia. Both species are toxic and give horrible dermatitis, but they occur in different parts of the country. Generally speaking, if you are on the west coast of North America you have to look out for poison oak, and if you are east of the Rocky Mountains and in the eastern part of the United States, you better learn quickly how poison ivy looks like.CDC has a good overview of the different toxic North American species in Toxicodendron.

The mistake was covered by several media stories, here are some: Philadelphia Inquirer, CNet and Neowin.

The dermatitis caused by these species can be very severe, and this is a plant group we all should be able to identify. If you ask Siri to look up poison oak you get the correct answer, so the botanical inaccuracy most likely happened in the making of the ad.  Since these are some of the most common and most toxic species we have in North America, this mistake is not minor...

Burt's Bees: Canola oil plant

The beauty and skin product company Burt's Bees gets a lot of their botany fully correct in their online ingredient list, but manage to get one of the most common plant-derived oils listed with a mistake in its scientific name, like this:

"CANOLA OIL (BRASSICA CAMPETSTRIS)" (link)

Canola oil comes from two different plants in the genus Brassica, which is in the mustard family (Brassicaceae).  In this genus are all the common cabbage crops - broccoli, cauliflower, broccoli rabe, white and red cabbage, brussels sprouts, rape seed, kale, collards, turnip, kohlrabi, some of the mustards, and rutabaga.  Through artificial breeding over hundreds of years these plants have been bred into crop varieties for the harvest of their seeds, leaves, roots, flowers, and seeds, respectively.

The two species that canola oil can come from are Brassica napus and Brassica rapa, and B. rapa now usually includes plants previously called Brassica campestris (not campetstris, as listed on Burt's Bees website). Since each species includes many cultivars and crops with a variety of common names, the scientific names have to be used to define the species in taxonomy.

INCI lists Canola oil as being  "an oil derived from Brassica napus L., Brassicaceae, low in erucic acid".  [Note the lack of italicizing the scientific name of the plant.]

Brassica napus. Source: Köhlers Medizinal-Pflanzen, Wikimedia, Public domain.

Canola oil is derived from the seeds, which are black and tiny and situated inside a long capsule. 

The Brassica taxonomy is still a bit uncertain (and messy), but here is an updated list of the species in the genus. Listing canola oil as Brassica campestris is not a major mistake considering the messy taxonomy of these species, but misspelling campestris is definitely incorrect.