July 13, 2015 • 40 mins
Peanut butter got its name in the 18th century, but it's been around in some form for hundreds and hundreds of years. The more modern history of the spread features changes to the recipe and even a little litigation with the FDA.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, this is Holly. I just wanted to give you
a little note before this episode gets started. In between
the time that we recorded it and when we are
publishing it, there was a new ruling handed down by
the US Food and Drug Administration. We're gonna talk a
little bit about the use of hydrogenated oils, which are
often called partially hydrogenated oils or phos in the U
(00:20):
s f d A literature, and they were actually now
themed by this ruling that they have to be removed
from all food products. So we're not going to talk
about that in the episode. And if you listen to
it and you go, hey, why didn't they bring that up?
That's not even allowed in food anymore, that is why.
So we're also gonna link to the FDA's press release
(00:41):
where they announced this officially, so you have it in
the show notes. So enjoyed the history of peanut butter.
Welcome to Stuff you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
(01:02):
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Wilson. Hey Tracy, I'm gonna
start with a question, what is your stance on peanut butter?
I love it, I love it, I will say when
I'm that emphatic about it, I don't want to give
anyone the rock impression. It's not in my top three flavors,
(01:24):
but I do love it deeply. You know, if I'm
going for a dessert thing, I'm gonna go more in
a vanilla butterscotch caramel arena. But in terms of just
day to day food, peanut butter is like where it's
at for me, Like I will eat it out of
the jar with a spoon and call it dinner. First,
several years when I was a kid, the sandwich that
was required to be in my lunch box each day
(01:44):
was peanut butter and bacon. If you've never tried this
culinary delight, I highly recommend it. It is delicious. Uh.
And if you ask most people who invented peanut butter,
usually they answer with George Washington Carver. Occasionally they will
talk about John Harvey Kellogg, who we talked about in
a previous episode of this podcast, And we're going to
(02:05):
talk about those guys and where they fit into the
whole thing in terms of the history of peanut butter.
But there were people mashing peanuts into a paste long
before either of those names came into the picture. Before
we go into the debate over who actually has bragging
rights to claim that they invented peanut butter, which is
a convoluted tale and of itself, we're gonna talk a
(02:26):
little bit about just how modern peanut butter is actually made. Unsurprisingly,
it starts with farmers after the last frost, So in
the northern hemisphere in places that they grow peanuts is
normally around April. That's when the peanut crop is planted.
Uh and in the United States, most farmers are growing
Virginia peanuts, Spanish peanuts, and runner peanuts. Peanut growers plant
(02:48):
on average a hundred fifteen to a hundred forty pounds,
which is between fifty two and sixty four of peanut
seeds per acre. The seeds, which are peanut kernels, are
planted just a couple of inches apart and also a
couple of inches underground, So seven to ten days after
they're planted, seedlings begin to emerge, and three to four
weeks after the seedlings first appear, peanut plants will begin
(03:11):
to flower. And peanuts are a self pollinating crop, and
they're kind of fascinating because while they flower above ground.
Once they're pollinated, the petals fall off and that fertilized
portion finds its way back into the soil to bear fruit.
So it's kind of odd that the flower then goes
back underground and then it becomes something ittable. The process
(03:33):
of penetrating the soil begins between forty five and sixty
days after planting, and at that point the peanut will
start to grow and its vine form. This is normally
when people start to use some supplemental irrigation to keep
the plants healthy. And once peanuts are matured, which is
about a hundred and twenty two hundred and sixty days
after planting, they're pulled from the ground. And in the
(03:54):
modern approach to this, there's a digger shaker which is
attached to a tractor and it's used to the peanuts,
tap roots and lift the plants up out of the ground.
This used to be done by hand and it was
very very labor intensive and very time consuming. But then
in this modern version, once the plants are are up
off the ground, they're shaken on this conveyor that's part
(04:16):
of the big mechanism, and that that kind of removes
some soil and it also flips them so that they're
left inverted on the ground with the plant side down
and the peanuts side up. Trying to remember for sure,
because you know, we we grew all of our vegetables
when I was growing up. I feel like a couple
of times we experimented with planting a small number of peanuts,
(04:36):
because I remember like pulling up plants that had peanuts
with lots of dirt underneath them. Yeah, but it's possible
that that was someone else's farm and I was on
the field. I don't know. Regardless, The plants remain in
the field for between two and three days to dry,
and then the actual picking is done. The dried plants
(04:59):
are pulled up in a have a star that picks
up and separates the peanut part from the dried bine part.
The peanuts will still need additional drying after they're harvested,
unless you're going to boil them, which is delicious. Okay,
they are delicious. They are delicious, but I have a
hard time getting over like the texture and soupiness factor.
(05:20):
That's a problem for me and the people that I
know that love boiled peanuts love boiled peanuts like they
will defend them staunchly. UH. The peanuts, after they're harvested
are often taken to a buying station, and this is
where they're cleaned to remove things like any sticks and
rocks that may have gotten in with the nut harvest,
(05:40):
even though they are not technically a nut. We'll get
to that later, uh. And the farmer next takes a
sample of these peanuts to Federal inspection to determine their grade,
and their grade is based on a variety of factors,
including general damage to the crop, forward material that might
still be in there after the cleaning and shaking, the
maturity of the peanut, as well as their moisture contents. Next,
(06:02):
the peanuts go to the shelling plant, where the actual
nuts are separated from the hull. After the shells and
any other remaining foreign material comes out, the shelled peanuts
go through an electric eye by a conveyor belt. The
eye is an optic sorder that further separates the nuts
based on their quality, and next they are separated based
on size, and at that point they're sorted into bins accordingly,
(06:25):
so a digital scale will measure the sorted nuts, usually
into these tote bags, these giant kind of UH synthetic
fabric tote bags that are capable of holding a metric
ton of content, and then the bags are taken to
dry storage, and if the nuts aren't needed in the
first four days after they're sorted, like if they haven't
been shipped out by that point, they're usually moved to
(06:46):
cold storage, and that would normally be set like a
thirty eight to forty two degrees fahrenheit or three point
three to five point six degrees celsius. Normally, from this
point peanuts go one of three ways. They go to
a blanch sure where the skins are removed so the
nuts can be sold to consumers, or they're exported, or
most importantly to today's topics, they're taken to a peanut
(07:08):
butter plant can also buy peanuts in the shell, which
would just skip some of the steps that we've talked
and talked about. Yeah, I love those two. Tracy is
a great nut proponent, a great peanut proponent. Uh So,
the peanuts that are taken to a peanut butter manufacturer
are normally roasted and then they're cooled very quickly to
stop them from cooking any further, and that helps retain
(07:30):
their oil contents. And then after roasting, the peanuts go
through a blanching process similar to the ones that would
happen if they had been sent directly to the blanchers,
and then one last cleaning is done before they go
to the grinding stage. Peanuts are ground once on their
own and then usually a second time with flavors, sweeteners,
and stabilizers added. Once the desired consistency is achieved, the
(07:53):
peanut butter goes into jars to be sealed before being
shipped to retailers for a consumer purchase. And continuing the
stories of peanuts from my childhood, uh, my my dad
worked at an organic food co op uh to help
us make ends meat when I was a child, and
he would come home with these tubs, like giant tubs
(08:13):
of organic peanut butter that you had to like stir
the oil back into the peanuts. It's also delicious. Um Uh. Now,
after all the talking that we just did about how
peanut butter gets made, we're keep that pretty specific to
the US. So you might think that the US is
actually the most prolific peanut producing nation, but that is
(08:33):
not accurate. In fact, both China and India actually grow
more peanuts than the United States, although a larger proportion
of the peanuts UH that are grown in the United
States are used for peanut butter than is the case
in either of the other countries. So about half of
the peanuts that are grown here in the United States
end up in a peanut butter jar. So that's how
(08:56):
peanut butter is made. But as to where peanuts actually
come from, in spite of how popular they are in
the United States, they are not native to North America.
Now this is an oddly lucky case of a species
being imported and not kind of getting out of control. Um.
And also, as I mentioned earlier, peanuts are not nuts
their legumes. They're more closely related to peas and beans
(09:19):
and alfalfa and clover. Peanuts got their scientific name iraqous
hypogaea in the eighteenth century from Carl Naus, who was
a Swedish botanist. The iracous part comes from the Greek
word for weed uh and the hypogaea part comes from
the Greek word for underground chambers, so this literally means
underground weed. But they're delicious um. But before they ever
(09:43):
got a scientific name, peanuts were growing in South America,
the place peanuts are believed to have first grown is
in the world's largest wetland, which is called Grand Pentenal,
which I could be woefully mispronouncing, and that takes up
roughly fifty thousand to seventy five thousand square miles or
a hundred and twenty nine thousand, two hundred and nine
(10:03):
four thousand square kilometers in tropical areas of Brazil, Bolivia,
and Paraguay. Peanuts are still a big part of the
culture in Bolivia and there used to make drinks and
soaps and they're eating its food. But the earliest known
point of peanut use is in Peru between three thousand
and two thousand BC. There are dig sites along Peru's
(10:24):
eastern coast that date back to five hundred and one
dred b C. Where people live on Earth's areas where
peanut shells are just scattered everywhere in enormous abundance. Yeah.
I think I read one description that said it was
like a modern baseball stadium. There were just so many
peanuts strewn about. Uh. And while it was not all
(10:45):
that much like today's peanut butters, there were some South
American cultures that were grinding up peanuts and they were mixing.
They were creating a paste with them and then mixing
that paste with cocoa to create a sort of spread,
although not as easy is spread as what we are
used to. I would eat that, I would too, It
sounds delicious from their peanuts are believed to have spread
(11:09):
up the Pacific coast into Mexico, but they would make
it to the American South via a much more roundabout route,
which we will go into in a minute, and which
people were arguing about on our Facebook page this week. Yeah. Yeah.
While peanuts were brought back to Europe by Portuguese and
Spanish explorers, they never kind of achieved the popularity there
(11:30):
that they have in North America. Spanish also carried peanuts
across the Pacific Ocean to the Malayan Archipelago in the
fifteen hundreds, and by sixteen o eight peanuts were in China. Uh.
And we certainly know that peanuts have become part of
many Asian cuisines, much to my palate's delight. Uh. There's
evidence of use of ground peanuts in West African cuisine
(11:52):
dating back five hundred years. And they traveled to Africa,
we think from Brazil, and the way that this was
commonly prepared. This sounds so delicious to me. The peanuts
would be broken up under a roller so kind of mashed,
and then they would be um mixed with honey and
red peppers. That sounds like an artisanal peanut butter to me. Seriously,
(12:17):
I'm sure you can find that in a yummy upscale
grocery store. From there, peanuts also made their way to
India in the sixteenth century. Yeah, so it's almost like
it kind of went in both directions to kind of
go around the belt of the the Earth to kind
of make their way. They had hit Asia and then
they kind of came into India from the other side.
(12:38):
And unfortunately, uh, it's thanks to the slave trade that
peanuts made their way from Africa back to the America's,
being transported sometimes on the same ships that actually carried
enslaved human cargo. Even in the United States, grinding peanuts
pre dates the timeline most commonly related to peanut butter,
(12:58):
more properly known. In the early half of the nineteenth century,
peanuts were sometimes ground or beaten into a paste and
then seasoned with salt to make a peanut porridge. But
while peanut pastes of a few different types were part
of cultures dating centuries back. Uh, and you know then
they had kind of become popular in the American South
around Civil War times where it really was the United
(13:22):
States though we're peanut butter as we know it came
into existence. But before we get to the American peanut
butter story, you don't have a word from a sponsor. Sure,
so getting into the tail of American peanut butter, the
earliest known American peanut butters were made with a combination
of Spanish and Virginia peanuts, both still very popular today. Uh.
(13:43):
Spanish peanuts have a higher concentration of oil than other varieties,
and they're extremely flavorful. Even though peanuts themselves were considered
to be a food with the lower classes, the first
iterations of peanut butter were really popular among the wealthy
and fashionable. But that really didn't last for very long.
It's peanut butter dropped in price as people got better
at making it more efficiently. It became a staple of
(14:05):
homes throughout the nation. Yeah. One uh, piece of literature
I was looking at said it really was only about
a ten year timeline that it went from being sort
of a new and fancy, high class food to be
in almost every pantry, which is a very short period
of time. But going back to the early introduction of
(14:25):
peanut butter as we know it today, it is linked,
as I said earlier to a previous podcast topic, John
Harvey Kellogg, and it was at his Western Health perform
Institute in Battle Creek, Michigan that some of the earliest
proponents of peanut butter could be found. When the story
goes that Kellogg started to grind peanuts for the patients
at his UH sanitarium who were unable to chew for
(14:48):
themselves or that had difficulty digesting things, so it was
kind of a pre chewing concept UH. And eventually he
switched from roasting the peanuts to steaming them to prevent
breaking down the oil eels because he thought that was
going to upset digestion. Kellogg applied for what's generally considered
to be the first peanut butter patent on November four
of eighteen. Although his invention was called a food compound
(15:13):
rather than peanut butter, it specified a manner of turning
nuts into a paste for eating. He filed two more
patents for similar food products in eighteen ninety seven and
eighteen ninety eight, although he later said he never patent
in peanut butter and thought all people should have access
to it. The Santitas Company, which he founded with his brothers,
was advertising nut butters and catalogs as of eighteen ninety seven.
(15:37):
Another player in this this story is George Bale, who
was a cracker salesman who eventually started his own snack company,
and he began producing and selling peanut butter as a
snack item rather than as a health food as Kellogg
had labeled it in eighteen ninety four, and Bail claimed
for many years that he was the original manufacturer of
peanut butter, and his advertising included that claim. Bail is
(16:01):
sometimes being credited as being one of the first manufacturers
of peanut butter to add salt, both to just regular
peanuts and a peanut butter. Thank you, George Bail, I
love me some salted peanuts. Uh. He passed away. In
whether Kellogg or Bail was really the first to come
up with peanut butter as we think of it today,
that remains something of a debate. There's more paperwork backing
(16:22):
up Kellogg's claim in the form of patents but detractors
point out that his peanut butter like food wasn't as
close to quote, real peanut butter as the bail formula was. Yeah,
a lot of them point out that the boiling rather
or the steaming rather than the roasting as being a
pretty distinctive variation, because the roasting really does bring out
(16:43):
a much different flavor. But regardless of who made it first,
peanut butter did, as I mentioned just a bit ago,
become incredibly popular, whether people were still eating it thinking
that it was a health food or whether they just
thought it was really tasty and a convenient snack. Uh.
In nineteen o four, nut butter was an attraction at
the St. Louis World's Fair, and shortly thereafter beech Nuts
(17:06):
began manufacturing it. Uh And unlike previous versions of peanut
butter that went to market in tens, beech nuts product
was the first that we know of that was shipped
in glass jars, and they continue to make peanut butter
for years. Beech Nut eventually merged with Life Savers in
nineteen fifty six. In nineteen o nine, Hines also got
(17:26):
into the peanut better game. Hines produced peanut butter until
it was crowded out of that market in the nineteen fifties. Uh.
And then between nineteen o three and nineteen ten, and
agricultural problem was making its way north from Central America
and this was the Bowl weevil. We could actually do
a whole episode on how detrimental the Bowl weevil invasion
was to US agriculture at the time. It was not pretty.
(17:48):
There were, you know, agricultural communities that basically shut down completely,
but that's another episode. However, as they pertained to peanuts, UH,
once they made their way to the US, these beetles
started gnashing on the cotton crop in the South, particularly
where cotton has normally grown, and they really did just
(18:09):
kind of break down the agricultural system there and they
left farmers looking for another crop that they could grow,
and for a lot of them, peanuts filled that void.
So people often credit George Washington Carver with inventing peanut butter,
and this whole bowlweevil inspired switch to planting peanuts instead
of cotton kind of figures into that legend. Carver was
(18:29):
a proponent of peanuts and there are many uses, and
he did teach farmers, particularly black farmers, about crop rotation
although that wasn't exactly a new concept at that point,
and he did write about peanuts quite a bit, although
some of his claims were not quite correct. Uh the
only peanut related patent Carver ever received was for a
cosmetic made from them and not peanut butter. Yeah, and
(18:53):
one of the incorrect claims he made was that peanuts
were easy to plant, growing harvest, And they are easy
to plant, and they're pretty easy to grow, but harvesting,
as I said, prior to machinery was just backbreaking labor.
H And at this point though, peanut butter was a
product that was being made, but it was primarily just
for regional markets because prior to hydrogenation, the spread just
(19:16):
did not travel well. So hydrogenations raised the melting point
of peanut butter so that it would stay solid at
room temperature and not separate into oils and solids. Today
you have to pay extra for that, uh yeah, because
you know, the fancy peanut butter that you gotta star
together cost the most. In the National Peanut Butter Manufacturers Association,
(19:38):
which today is the Peanut and Peanut Processors Association, was formed,
So okay, we're gonna start talking a lot about hydrogenation,
and because it becomes really important in the story of
peanut butter, so we actually want to also talk about
exactly what that is. And to do that, I'm actually
gonna um, We're gonna quote passage from John Crampner's book
(20:01):
Creamy and Crunchy and Informal History of Peanut Butter, the
All American Food, rather than sort of trying to reinvent
the food science wheel, because he lays it out very nicely.
The hydrogenation process consists of bubbling hydrogen into the bottom
of a tank of vegetable oil in the presence of
a catalyst such as powdered nickel. This isn't done at
the peanut butter plant, but a separate facility. When vegetable
(20:23):
oil is hydrogenated, two things happen. Hydrogen atoms attached themselves
to carbon atoms, and the double bonds of electrons between
some carbon atoms are replaced by single bonds between the
carbon and hydrogen atoms Vegetable oil molecules with double bonds
have a bent or kink structure, so they don't stack
together easily, causing them to remain fluid. Molecules with single
bonds are straighter, stacked together easily, and are solid. By
(20:46):
replacing double bonds with single bonds, hydrogenation creates a more
tightly packed crystalline structure in the vegetable oil, raising its
melting point. So yeah, that's basically what they're saying is
this makes it um all stick together but not become
a solid, so it remains spreadable and smoother. Um. And
I feel like we should briefly talk about trans fats
(21:07):
because they are the villains of modern nutrition and they
are part of this process. They're created when the ground
peanuts and hydrogenated oil are heated to very high temperatures
and then rapidly cooled, and this crystallizes the fatty acids
in the mixture. Transpats, as we know, lead to arterial clogging.
And that's because their melting point is so high that
they can't really be burned off like through exercise, Like
(21:28):
you could never really work out hard enough to activate
the melting of them and for them to easily be
um um metabolized and moved out of your body. So
they tend to accumulate, and that's why people are very
twitchy about them. So this whole transpat situation might make
you want to shun peanut butter, but when it's correctly made,
the product only has really tiny amounts of transpats. The
(21:50):
presence of transpats and peanut butter falls well below the
FDA standard that would require it to be mentioned on
the label. Yeah, I didn't um double checked the veracity
of it, but I read one statement from a food
scientist that said, basically, if you eat one cookie with
trans fats in it, it is far more transfats than
(22:10):
you would get in many, many servings of peanut butter.
So it really is kind of a trace amount. So
now that we've got the science lesson out of the way,
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It's history and you can go to squarespace dot com
slash history to find out more. So, a gentleman named
Joseph rose Field figures very prominently in peanut butter history.
On April five one, he filed for a patent for
(24:22):
his process of partially hydrogenating peanut butter to stabilize it,
and in ntree he manufactured a brand called Luncheon Uh,
and this was an unstabilized peanut butter. Though in nine
or twenty four rose Field licenses patent to the Swift
Company and in a short lived brand introduced by Swift
was named either Dainty or Delicia, and it was making
(24:46):
peanut butter using rose Field's patented process. Yeah, and the
reason that we're not sure of the name is. There's
not a lot of documentation, and that information is taken
from um court testimony that rose Field's children gave in
I think in nineteen eighties, so it was much later
and they were working from memory and they couldn't quite
recall the exact name. But that's why we're not sure
of it. But Swift's early effort with either Dainty or Delicia,
(25:10):
whichever it was called, did not sell particularly well. However,
they didn't abandon this idea. The company made another run
at peanut butter manufacturer, again using rose Field's partial hydrogenation
patent in Night and this is when they introduced it
as peter Pan, which of course became the first big
brand on the market, which is what I wanted desperately
(25:32):
as a child when we were eating peanut butter from
a tub that had to be stirred together. Now was
it because peter Pan was smooth and delicious or was
it because it was called peter Pan? Uh? It was
because it was like smooth and delicious and sugary and
not not so. The difference is not nearly as pronounced today,
(25:54):
but the texture of the organic sturren together peanut butter
from nineteen seven nine was like kind of dry and
chunky and didn't spread very well. Um, whereas like peter
Pan peanut butter was this magical sweet deliciousness because it's
also there's a fair amount of sugar and a lot
(26:14):
of and a lot of peanut butter's in addition to
the peanut part. So we'll talk about that in a minute. Yeah,
I'm pretty sure that I would go to my grandmother's
house and she would make us peanut butter and jelly sandwiches,
and they would be peanut butter. There would be Peter
Pan peanut butter on white bread with jelly, none of
which were appropriate things to eat at our house. There
(26:41):
was also another man who patent today food product just
a few weeks before rose Field, and his name was
Frank Stockton, the first pattern that actually used the phrase
peanut butter, and Stockton's patents described a full hydrogenation process,
which made for a less creamy product and one that
was more of a salad with a higher melting point.
He licensed his hydrogenation process to Hynes. He was producing
(27:03):
hydrogenated peanut butter as early as Yeah. Even when you
get into kind of more in depth stories, of how
peanut butter came to be what it is today. UM.
Frank Stockton often gets left out of the picture in
part because some uh, let's say that his full hydrogenation
process just it made for a peanut butter that was
(27:24):
not as naturally delicious because it was more solid, it
was harder to spread. Some would feel like it was
kind of a step back in terms of UM, you know,
consumer appeal. And rose Field and the Peter Pan Company,
you'll remember they were licensing his partial hydrogenation process, had
a pretty significant falling out in ninety two after some
(27:45):
changes in leadership at UM, the Swift Company, which owned
Peter Pan, the manufacturer, made a move to reduce the
fee that they were paying rose Field for licensing his
partial hydrogenation process, and he was not having that, and
the two ends he's went their separate ways, and then
rose Field started his own peanut butter company called Skippy. Uh.
(28:06):
The Swift Company, which again had been the parent to
Peter Pan, switched to a different hydrogenation process, which was
patented by a man named Leo Brown in two. And
Brown's patent is kind of interesting because, UM, a lot
of it really focuses on its prevention of the products
sticking to the roof of the consumer's mouse. They could
talks a lot about saliva and how it will factor
(28:27):
in with this different hydrogenation process. Rose Field further experimented
with peanut butter production by setting up a lab and
testing out a new system to try to get a smoother,
more palatable mixture. He started turning his peanut butter rather
than grinding it, which was the normal method, by then
dropping crushed nuts into the mixture. He invented chunky peanut butter,
(28:47):
which was introduced in ninety five and which I have
never cared for. Oh ha, ha ha ha, You're dead to me,
Tracy V. Wilson, because I'm all about the chunky peanut butter.
Um you and your smooth Peter. I'm sticking with Skippy,
I guess uh. Rose Field also introduced a chocolate peanut
(29:08):
butter combo in the form of choc nut Butter, although
this product never really caught on, but he was kind
of ahead of his time because five years later, the
Reese's Cup was introduced and it kind of went off
like gangbusters. In five rose Field sold Skippy to Best
Foods for six million dollars uh. Which also this also
(29:29):
was a company that makes Hellman's mayonnaise products. Yeah uh
so also in nive there was a Kentucky man named
William T. Young, and he sold his company, which at
the time was called Big Top Peanut Butter, to Procter
and Gamble, and Procter and Gamble reformulated Young's recipe pretty significantly.
They used alternate oils to peanut oils in the hydrogenation process.
(29:53):
Then they started adding sugar and molasses to their products.
This new version of the recipe was rebranded as IF
and competitors took notice. Soon afterward, other peanut butter manufacturers
started adding sweeteners and non peanut oils to their products,
and then the Food and Drug Administration got involved. Uh.
(30:14):
They were watching this kind of shift in peanut butter
from being just peanuts and peanut oil to peanuts, peanut oil,
other oils, and sugars, and they were not okay with
a product that included non peanut ingredients being labeled as
peanut butter. The FDA stance was it a product needed
to be peanuts to be marketed as peanut butter. But manufacturers,
(30:37):
on the other hand, thought that was a much more
reasonable number, and thus began twelve years of legal back
and forth about what percentage of peanuts has to be
in peanut butter for it's really be peanut butter. Finally
in the FDA and manufacturers settled on nine as the
amount of peanuts a jar of peanut butter must contain. Yeah,
(31:00):
and it was one of those things when I was
doing my research. I didn't include it here because it
gets very mathey in a hurry. But a lot of
the arguments were like, Okay, but if we include this
many peanuts and this much peanut oil, then we don't
have any space to put molasses in, So that's not
really a workable recipe for us. Like it was all
sort of A lot of their argument was science based
and like what could actually fit in the recipe and
(31:22):
still make it palatable and competitive on the market, and
what consumers were used to eating. Um, So, since the
nineteen seventies, there have, of course, I'm sure all of
our listeners will remember one or another recall or a
shifting health trend that have damaged one big peanut butter
brand or another for a time. But peanut butter just
(31:43):
as a food has really remained a staple in pantries,
certainly throughout the US and in other parts of the world. Yeah.
I think one of the I know, one of the
reasons that we ate it so much as a child
was that even uh, even though they were they were
buying organic from a food co op, it was like
not a brand of it was like a tub of
(32:05):
industrial sized, super cheap. We can make a million sandwhich
is out of this peanut butter that had to be
stirred together with this bachelor. Oh yeah, there are so
many tales of like, uh, you know, I'm sure anybody
in their friends circle will be like, oh, when I
was in college and super broke, I would just buy
like a jar of peanut butter and a loaf of
bread and that would have to last week for the week.
(32:26):
And even famous people often love to tell their like
I was so broke peanut butter stories that are basically
the same story of this is what sustained me when
I wasn't able to, you know, afford more um variety
in my diet. So peanut butter has saved a lot
of people from being hungry, that's for sure. And I
thought to close out it might be fun just to
(32:46):
share a handful of fun facts about peanut butter. By
the time he retired to start off J'SA. Rose Field
had ten food patents. Yeah, he really did some interesting
things in terms of the food industry. He paid his
workers all out more than than most other companies were.
He invented the wide mouth peanut butter jar. Uh. He
was very into uh kind of moving and shaking and
(33:08):
trying new things. Um. In n seven, the New Yorker
published its first peanut butter cartoon, and that was by
some a sure sign that the product had become a
cultural institution. To make its well bounced jar of peanut butter,
you'll need about five and forty peanuts. That's so when
you mentioned earlier, if you saw my Rye Grand when
you were talking about possibly experimenting with planting peanuts, it's
(33:31):
one of those things where you have to plant so
many to get a little bit of a crop. So well,
and if my memory is accurately, pretty much grew them
and snacked on them, and it's hirely possible that I'm
conflating them with some other root food that we grew.
U two was the first year that hydrogenated peanut butter
(33:53):
out sold natural peanut butter. And while peanut butter is
often seen as a staple for people with limited budget,
fancy peanut butters are now a large part of the market.
I will confess I buy fancy peanut butter. I do sometimes,
but every once in a while, um, I'll be on
the peanut butter. I'll looking at the sort of you know,
(34:13):
organics and the naturals, and I'll look at Brian and
be like, not this time, I gotta go with the
the old standards for sugar in them, because they are
very delicious and they're kind of um. There's a lot
of nostalgia that's part of it. One acre of peanuts
translates to roughly thirty peanut butter sandwiches. About eight percent
of today's peanut butters are hydrogenated, and to be labeled
(34:37):
as natural peanut butter, the product can contain natural sweeteners
and salt, but no stabilizers. So that's why a natural
peanut butters often have to be um stirred. Now, there
are a lot and I haven't looked into the science
of this, but have you seen these where it's like
it's natural peanut butter that you do not have to
(34:58):
stir like the label will state no stirring needed. How
are they doing that? I have seen that, but I
have not bought them because I have this weird nostalgia
for stirring the peanut butter because of my weirdo organic childhood. Uh.
In Delta Airlines distributed sixty nine point six million packs
(35:21):
of peanuts on its flights. Related to that and to
what I'm going to say next, I was on a
flight very recently where there were no peanuts served because
there was someone on the flight who had a severe
peanut allergy. And it turned out that was my seat mate.
Oh my goodness. Uh. As many as six out of
a thousand people in the United States have peanut allergies,
which is really sad because, in addition to the fact
(35:42):
that it means you can't eat this pretty cheap and
tasty staple like often peanut allergies are just deadly, which
is why they were not served on the entire airplane
because there was one person with a severe allergy. Yeah,
and it's one of those things. I'm sure anybody who's
listening that's dealt with peanut allergy, and even bills that
haven't probably no peanuts and peanut powder show up in
(36:05):
some unusual places. It's kind of like gluten, where you don't.
It's not always in the places you automatically think it
would be, so that it's very restrictive. It makes me
sad because I love peanut butter so much. I wish
everybody could chow down on it. Yeah, and I know
that there are people who are really against the idea
of banning peanuts from a place because of allergies, But seriously,
an airplane, Like, what are you going to do if
(36:26):
you have a medical emergency in the eight when you're
trapped in a steel tube her Ling group space um.
Peanuts actually contribute more than four billion dollars to the
US economy every single year, and Americans spend almost eight
hundred million dollars a year on peanut butter. Uh. The
(36:48):
average American eats about six pounds that's roughly two point
seven kgs of peanuts and peanut butter products each year.
I'm really quite confident in all seriousness that you could
triple that number for me, and we'll just leave that there. Well,
in my weirdo organic childhood, one of the things that
(37:08):
we would have for a snack would be uh some
some peanut butter from the tub of peanut butter that
had to be starred together with a bachelor. Um and
and honey smashed together in a cup. Who young? I
still do that sometimes, um and I usually my breakfast
lately has been peanut butter on a fruit, like peanut
(37:30):
butter on apple or peanut butter on banana. It's good stuff.
I'm a fan of peanut butter. Uh So with that,
and now with my salivating, I will read a little
bit of listener mail. Let's do that. First is a
brief emale from our listener Brian, and he says, I
was in Columbia a couple of months ago on a
(37:52):
business trip, and my host mentioned their problem with invasive hippos,
which the drug lord Pablo Escobar has smuggled into the country.
They escaped years ago from his private zoo and have
been breeding in the wild. As with many invasive species,
they are thriving in South America. And then he links
us to a BBC article on the problem. And that's
in reference to our recent two part episode on the
(38:15):
American effort to bring hippos to the US to become
Lake Bacon. But I also liked including it with this
episode because, as we said, peanuts are not native to
North America, yet they imported and they did not take
over except in my heart. I also wanted to give
a shout out to our listener Juliana. She is traveling
through the UK and she has sent us a couple
of really cool and gorgeous postcards and I just wanted
(38:37):
to thank her for those. She sent us one from
Ramsey Garden in Edinburgh, and she also sent us one
from Letchley Park. So thank you so much, Juliana. It's
like we get to travel the world with you and another. Uh.
If you would like to write us, you can do
so at History Podcast at house to Works dot com.
You can also connect with us at Facebook dot com
(38:57):
slash mist in History, on Twitter, at mys in history,
at missed in History dot tumbler dot com, and at
pinterest dot com slash missed in History. You would like
to purchase some stubbu missed in History class goodies, you
can do that at miss in History dot spreadshirt dot com.
And then we have at least one new shirt that's
gone into the story recently. Uh. And if you would
like to learn a little bit more about what we
(39:18):
talked about today. You can go to our parents site,
how stuff Works, Type in the words peanut butter in
the search bar and you will get an article called
what if I ate only peanut butter for the rest
of my life? Well, that sounds delicious, don't do it.
But if you would like to visit us on the web,
that's at missed in history dot com. You can find
there an archive of all of our episodes, all of
(39:39):
the show notes from the episodes that Tracy and I
have been doing for the last couple of years. You'll
also find some other goodies at missed in History, So
please come and visit us at missed in history dot
com and how stubb Works dot com for more on
this and thousands of other topics. How stuff works dot
com set in the int
Hey, this is Holly. I just wanted to give you
a little note before this episode gets started. In between
the time that we recorded it and when we are
publishing it, there was a new ruling handed down by
the US Food and Drug Administration. We're gonna talk a
little bit about the use of hydrogenated oils, which are
often called partially hydrogenated oils or phos in the U
(00:20):
s f d A literature, and they were actually now
themed by this ruling that they have to be removed
from all food products. So we're not going to talk
about that in the episode. And if you listen to
it and you go, hey, why didn't they bring that up?
That's not even allowed in food anymore, that is why.
So we're also gonna link to the FDA's press release
(00:41):
where they announced this officially, so you have it in
the show notes. So enjoyed the history of peanut butter.
Welcome to Stuff you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
(01:02):
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Wilson. Hey Tracy, I'm gonna
start with a question, what is your stance on peanut butter?
I love it, I love it, I will say when
I'm that emphatic about it, I don't want to give
anyone the rock impression. It's not in my top three flavors,
(01:24):
but I do love it deeply. You know, if I'm
going for a dessert thing, I'm gonna go more in
a vanilla butterscotch caramel arena. But in terms of just
day to day food, peanut butter is like where it's
at for me, Like I will eat it out of
the jar with a spoon and call it dinner. First,
several years when I was a kid, the sandwich that
was required to be in my lunch box each day
(01:44):
was peanut butter and bacon. If you've never tried this
culinary delight, I highly recommend it. It is delicious. Uh.
And if you ask most people who invented peanut butter,
usually they answer with George Washington Carver. Occasionally they will
talk about John Harvey Kellogg, who we talked about in
a previous episode of this podcast, And we're going to
(02:05):
talk about those guys and where they fit into the
whole thing in terms of the history of peanut butter.
But there were people mashing peanuts into a paste long
before either of those names came into the picture. Before
we go into the debate over who actually has bragging
rights to claim that they invented peanut butter, which is
a convoluted tale and of itself, we're gonna talk a
(02:26):
little bit about just how modern peanut butter is actually made. Unsurprisingly,
it starts with farmers after the last frost, So in
the northern hemisphere in places that they grow peanuts is
normally around April. That's when the peanut crop is planted.
Uh and in the United States, most farmers are growing
Virginia peanuts, Spanish peanuts, and runner peanuts. Peanut growers plant
(02:48):
on average a hundred fifteen to a hundred forty pounds,
which is between fifty two and sixty four of peanut
seeds per acre. The seeds, which are peanut kernels, are
planted just a couple of inches apart and also a
couple of inches underground, So seven to ten days after
they're planted, seedlings begin to emerge, and three to four
weeks after the seedlings first appear, peanut plants will begin
(03:11):
to flower. And peanuts are a self pollinating crop, and
they're kind of fascinating because while they flower above ground.
Once they're pollinated, the petals fall off and that fertilized
portion finds its way back into the soil to bear fruit.
So it's kind of odd that the flower then goes
back underground and then it becomes something ittable. The process
(03:33):
of penetrating the soil begins between forty five and sixty
days after planting, and at that point the peanut will
start to grow and its vine form. This is normally
when people start to use some supplemental irrigation to keep
the plants healthy. And once peanuts are matured, which is
about a hundred and twenty two hundred and sixty days
after planting, they're pulled from the ground. And in the
(03:54):
modern approach to this, there's a digger shaker which is
attached to a tractor and it's used to the peanuts,
tap roots and lift the plants up out of the ground.
This used to be done by hand and it was
very very labor intensive and very time consuming. But then
in this modern version, once the plants are are up
off the ground, they're shaken on this conveyor that's part
(04:16):
of the big mechanism, and that that kind of removes
some soil and it also flips them so that they're
left inverted on the ground with the plant side down
and the peanuts side up. Trying to remember for sure,
because you know, we we grew all of our vegetables
when I was growing up. I feel like a couple
of times we experimented with planting a small number of peanuts,
(04:36):
because I remember like pulling up plants that had peanuts
with lots of dirt underneath them. Yeah, but it's possible
that that was someone else's farm and I was on
the field. I don't know. Regardless, The plants remain in
the field for between two and three days to dry,
and then the actual picking is done. The dried plants
(04:59):
are pulled up in a have a star that picks
up and separates the peanut part from the dried bine part.
The peanuts will still need additional drying after they're harvested,
unless you're going to boil them, which is delicious. Okay,
they are delicious. They are delicious, but I have a
hard time getting over like the texture and soupiness factor.
(05:20):
That's a problem for me and the people that I
know that love boiled peanuts love boiled peanuts like they
will defend them staunchly. UH. The peanuts, after they're harvested
are often taken to a buying station, and this is
where they're cleaned to remove things like any sticks and
rocks that may have gotten in with the nut harvest,
(05:40):
even though they are not technically a nut. We'll get
to that later, uh. And the farmer next takes a
sample of these peanuts to Federal inspection to determine their grade,
and their grade is based on a variety of factors,
including general damage to the crop, forward material that might
still be in there after the cleaning and shaking, the
maturity of the peanut, as well as their moisture contents. Next,
(06:02):
the peanuts go to the shelling plant, where the actual
nuts are separated from the hull. After the shells and
any other remaining foreign material comes out, the shelled peanuts
go through an electric eye by a conveyor belt. The
eye is an optic sorder that further separates the nuts
based on their quality, and next they are separated based
on size, and at that point they're sorted into bins accordingly,
(06:25):
so a digital scale will measure the sorted nuts, usually
into these tote bags, these giant kind of UH synthetic
fabric tote bags that are capable of holding a metric
ton of content, and then the bags are taken to
dry storage, and if the nuts aren't needed in the
first four days after they're sorted, like if they haven't
been shipped out by that point, they're usually moved to
(06:46):
cold storage, and that would normally be set like a
thirty eight to forty two degrees fahrenheit or three point
three to five point six degrees celsius. Normally, from this
point peanuts go one of three ways. They go to
a blanch sure where the skins are removed so the
nuts can be sold to consumers, or they're exported, or
most importantly to today's topics, they're taken to a peanut
(07:08):
butter plant can also buy peanuts in the shell, which
would just skip some of the steps that we've talked
and talked about. Yeah, I love those two. Tracy is
a great nut proponent, a great peanut proponent. Uh So,
the peanuts that are taken to a peanut butter manufacturer
are normally roasted and then they're cooled very quickly to
stop them from cooking any further, and that helps retain
(07:30):
their oil contents. And then after roasting, the peanuts go
through a blanching process similar to the ones that would
happen if they had been sent directly to the blanchers,
and then one last cleaning is done before they go
to the grinding stage. Peanuts are ground once on their
own and then usually a second time with flavors, sweeteners,
and stabilizers added. Once the desired consistency is achieved, the
(07:53):
peanut butter goes into jars to be sealed before being
shipped to retailers for a consumer purchase. And continuing the
stories of peanuts from my childhood, uh, my my dad
worked at an organic food co op uh to help
us make ends meat when I was a child, and
he would come home with these tubs, like giant tubs
(08:13):
of organic peanut butter that you had to like stir
the oil back into the peanuts. It's also delicious. Um Uh. Now,
after all the talking that we just did about how
peanut butter gets made, we're keep that pretty specific to
the US. So you might think that the US is
actually the most prolific peanut producing nation, but that is
(08:33):
not accurate. In fact, both China and India actually grow
more peanuts than the United States, although a larger proportion
of the peanuts UH that are grown in the United
States are used for peanut butter than is the case
in either of the other countries. So about half of
the peanuts that are grown here in the United States
end up in a peanut butter jar. So that's how
(08:56):
peanut butter is made. But as to where peanuts actually
come from, in spite of how popular they are in
the United States, they are not native to North America.
Now this is an oddly lucky case of a species
being imported and not kind of getting out of control. Um.
And also, as I mentioned earlier, peanuts are not nuts
their legumes. They're more closely related to peas and beans
(09:19):
and alfalfa and clover. Peanuts got their scientific name iraqous
hypogaea in the eighteenth century from Carl Naus, who was
a Swedish botanist. The iracous part comes from the Greek
word for weed uh and the hypogaea part comes from
the Greek word for underground chambers, so this literally means
underground weed. But they're delicious um. But before they ever
(09:43):
got a scientific name, peanuts were growing in South America,
the place peanuts are believed to have first grown is
in the world's largest wetland, which is called Grand Pentenal,
which I could be woefully mispronouncing, and that takes up
roughly fifty thousand to seventy five thousand square miles or
a hundred and twenty nine thousand, two hundred and nine
(10:03):
four thousand square kilometers in tropical areas of Brazil, Bolivia,
and Paraguay. Peanuts are still a big part of the
culture in Bolivia and there used to make drinks and
soaps and they're eating its food. But the earliest known
point of peanut use is in Peru between three thousand
and two thousand BC. There are dig sites along Peru's
(10:24):
eastern coast that date back to five hundred and one
dred b C. Where people live on Earth's areas where
peanut shells are just scattered everywhere in enormous abundance. Yeah.
I think I read one description that said it was
like a modern baseball stadium. There were just so many
peanuts strewn about. Uh. And while it was not all
(10:45):
that much like today's peanut butters, there were some South
American cultures that were grinding up peanuts and they were mixing.
They were creating a paste with them and then mixing
that paste with cocoa to create a sort of spread,
although not as easy is spread as what we are
used to. I would eat that, I would too, It
sounds delicious from their peanuts are believed to have spread
(11:09):
up the Pacific coast into Mexico, but they would make
it to the American South via a much more roundabout route,
which we will go into in a minute, and which
people were arguing about on our Facebook page this week. Yeah. Yeah.
While peanuts were brought back to Europe by Portuguese and
Spanish explorers, they never kind of achieved the popularity there
(11:30):
that they have in North America. Spanish also carried peanuts
across the Pacific Ocean to the Malayan Archipelago in the
fifteen hundreds, and by sixteen o eight peanuts were in China. Uh.
And we certainly know that peanuts have become part of
many Asian cuisines, much to my palate's delight. Uh. There's
evidence of use of ground peanuts in West African cuisine
(11:52):
dating back five hundred years. And they traveled to Africa,
we think from Brazil, and the way that this was
commonly prepared. This sounds so delicious to me. The peanuts
would be broken up under a roller so kind of mashed,
and then they would be um mixed with honey and
red peppers. That sounds like an artisanal peanut butter to me. Seriously,
(12:17):
I'm sure you can find that in a yummy upscale
grocery store. From there, peanuts also made their way to
India in the sixteenth century. Yeah, so it's almost like
it kind of went in both directions to kind of
go around the belt of the the Earth to kind
of make their way. They had hit Asia and then
they kind of came into India from the other side.
(12:38):
And unfortunately, uh, it's thanks to the slave trade that
peanuts made their way from Africa back to the America's,
being transported sometimes on the same ships that actually carried
enslaved human cargo. Even in the United States, grinding peanuts
pre dates the timeline most commonly related to peanut butter,
(12:58):
more properly known. In the early half of the nineteenth century,
peanuts were sometimes ground or beaten into a paste and
then seasoned with salt to make a peanut porridge. But
while peanut pastes of a few different types were part
of cultures dating centuries back. Uh, and you know then
they had kind of become popular in the American South
around Civil War times where it really was the United
(13:22):
States though we're peanut butter as we know it came
into existence. But before we get to the American peanut
butter story, you don't have a word from a sponsor. Sure,
so getting into the tail of American peanut butter, the
earliest known American peanut butters were made with a combination
of Spanish and Virginia peanuts, both still very popular today. Uh.
(13:43):
Spanish peanuts have a higher concentration of oil than other varieties,
and they're extremely flavorful. Even though peanuts themselves were considered
to be a food with the lower classes, the first
iterations of peanut butter were really popular among the wealthy
and fashionable. But that really didn't last for very long.
It's peanut butter dropped in price as people got better
at making it more efficiently. It became a staple of
(14:05):
homes throughout the nation. Yeah. One uh, piece of literature
I was looking at said it really was only about
a ten year timeline that it went from being sort
of a new and fancy, high class food to be
in almost every pantry, which is a very short period
of time. But going back to the early introduction of
(14:25):
peanut butter as we know it today, it is linked,
as I said earlier to a previous podcast topic, John
Harvey Kellogg, and it was at his Western Health perform
Institute in Battle Creek, Michigan that some of the earliest
proponents of peanut butter could be found. When the story
goes that Kellogg started to grind peanuts for the patients
at his UH sanitarium who were unable to chew for
(14:48):
themselves or that had difficulty digesting things, so it was
kind of a pre chewing concept UH. And eventually he
switched from roasting the peanuts to steaming them to prevent
breaking down the oil eels because he thought that was
going to upset digestion. Kellogg applied for what's generally considered
to be the first peanut butter patent on November four
of eighteen. Although his invention was called a food compound
(15:13):
rather than peanut butter, it specified a manner of turning
nuts into a paste for eating. He filed two more
patents for similar food products in eighteen ninety seven and
eighteen ninety eight, although he later said he never patent
in peanut butter and thought all people should have access
to it. The Santitas Company, which he founded with his brothers,
was advertising nut butters and catalogs as of eighteen ninety seven.
(15:37):
Another player in this this story is George Bale, who
was a cracker salesman who eventually started his own snack company,
and he began producing and selling peanut butter as a
snack item rather than as a health food as Kellogg
had labeled it in eighteen ninety four, and Bail claimed
for many years that he was the original manufacturer of
peanut butter, and his advertising included that claim. Bail is
(16:01):
sometimes being credited as being one of the first manufacturers
of peanut butter to add salt, both to just regular
peanuts and a peanut butter. Thank you, George Bail, I
love me some salted peanuts. Uh. He passed away. In
whether Kellogg or Bail was really the first to come
up with peanut butter as we think of it today,
that remains something of a debate. There's more paperwork backing
(16:22):
up Kellogg's claim in the form of patents but detractors
point out that his peanut butter like food wasn't as
close to quote, real peanut butter as the bail formula was. Yeah,
a lot of them point out that the boiling rather
or the steaming rather than the roasting as being a
pretty distinctive variation, because the roasting really does bring out
(16:43):
a much different flavor. But regardless of who made it first,
peanut butter did, as I mentioned just a bit ago,
become incredibly popular, whether people were still eating it thinking
that it was a health food or whether they just
thought it was really tasty and a convenient snack. Uh.
In nineteen o four, nut butter was an attraction at
the St. Louis World's Fair, and shortly thereafter beech Nuts
(17:06):
began manufacturing it. Uh And unlike previous versions of peanut
butter that went to market in tens, beech nuts product
was the first that we know of that was shipped
in glass jars, and they continue to make peanut butter
for years. Beech Nut eventually merged with Life Savers in
nineteen fifty six. In nineteen o nine, Hines also got
(17:26):
into the peanut better game. Hines produced peanut butter until
it was crowded out of that market in the nineteen fifties. Uh.
And then between nineteen o three and nineteen ten, and
agricultural problem was making its way north from Central America
and this was the Bowl weevil. We could actually do
a whole episode on how detrimental the Bowl weevil invasion
was to US agriculture at the time. It was not pretty.
(17:48):
There were, you know, agricultural communities that basically shut down completely,
but that's another episode. However, as they pertained to peanuts, UH,
once they made their way to the US, these beetles
started gnashing on the cotton crop in the South, particularly
where cotton has normally grown, and they really did just
(18:09):
kind of break down the agricultural system there and they
left farmers looking for another crop that they could grow,
and for a lot of them, peanuts filled that void.
So people often credit George Washington Carver with inventing peanut butter,
and this whole bowlweevil inspired switch to planting peanuts instead
of cotton kind of figures into that legend. Carver was
(18:29):
a proponent of peanuts and there are many uses, and
he did teach farmers, particularly black farmers, about crop rotation
although that wasn't exactly a new concept at that point,
and he did write about peanuts quite a bit, although
some of his claims were not quite correct. Uh the
only peanut related patent Carver ever received was for a
cosmetic made from them and not peanut butter. Yeah, and
(18:53):
one of the incorrect claims he made was that peanuts
were easy to plant, growing harvest, And they are easy
to plant, and they're pretty easy to grow, but harvesting,
as I said, prior to machinery was just backbreaking labor.
H And at this point though, peanut butter was a
product that was being made, but it was primarily just
for regional markets because prior to hydrogenation, the spread just
(19:16):
did not travel well. So hydrogenations raised the melting point
of peanut butter so that it would stay solid at
room temperature and not separate into oils and solids. Today
you have to pay extra for that, uh yeah, because
you know, the fancy peanut butter that you gotta star
together cost the most. In the National Peanut Butter Manufacturers Association,
(19:38):
which today is the Peanut and Peanut Processors Association, was formed,
So okay, we're gonna start talking a lot about hydrogenation,
and because it becomes really important in the story of
peanut butter, so we actually want to also talk about
exactly what that is. And to do that, I'm actually
gonna um, We're gonna quote passage from John Crampner's book
(20:01):
Creamy and Crunchy and Informal History of Peanut Butter, the
All American Food, rather than sort of trying to reinvent
the food science wheel, because he lays it out very nicely.
The hydrogenation process consists of bubbling hydrogen into the bottom
of a tank of vegetable oil in the presence of
a catalyst such as powdered nickel. This isn't done at
the peanut butter plant, but a separate facility. When vegetable
(20:23):
oil is hydrogenated, two things happen. Hydrogen atoms attached themselves
to carbon atoms, and the double bonds of electrons between
some carbon atoms are replaced by single bonds between the
carbon and hydrogen atoms Vegetable oil molecules with double bonds
have a bent or kink structure, so they don't stack
together easily, causing them to remain fluid. Molecules with single
bonds are straighter, stacked together easily, and are solid. By
(20:46):
replacing double bonds with single bonds, hydrogenation creates a more
tightly packed crystalline structure in the vegetable oil, raising its
melting point. So yeah, that's basically what they're saying is
this makes it um all stick together but not become
a solid, so it remains spreadable and smoother. Um. And
I feel like we should briefly talk about trans fats
(21:07):
because they are the villains of modern nutrition and they
are part of this process. They're created when the ground
peanuts and hydrogenated oil are heated to very high temperatures
and then rapidly cooled, and this crystallizes the fatty acids
in the mixture. Transpats, as we know, lead to arterial clogging.
And that's because their melting point is so high that
they can't really be burned off like through exercise, Like
(21:28):
you could never really work out hard enough to activate
the melting of them and for them to easily be
um um metabolized and moved out of your body. So
they tend to accumulate, and that's why people are very
twitchy about them. So this whole transpat situation might make
you want to shun peanut butter, but when it's correctly made,
the product only has really tiny amounts of transpats. The
(21:50):
presence of transpats and peanut butter falls well below the
FDA standard that would require it to be mentioned on
the label. Yeah, I didn't um double checked the veracity
of it, but I read one statement from a food
scientist that said, basically, if you eat one cookie with
trans fats in it, it is far more transfats than
(22:10):
you would get in many, many servings of peanut butter.
So it really is kind of a trace amount. So
now that we've got the science lesson out of the way,
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It's history and you can go to squarespace dot com
slash history to find out more. So, a gentleman named
Joseph rose Field figures very prominently in peanut butter history.
On April five one, he filed for a patent for
(24:22):
his process of partially hydrogenating peanut butter to stabilize it,
and in ntree he manufactured a brand called Luncheon Uh,
and this was an unstabilized peanut butter. Though in nine
or twenty four rose Field licenses patent to the Swift
Company and in a short lived brand introduced by Swift
was named either Dainty or Delicia, and it was making
(24:46):
peanut butter using rose Field's patented process. Yeah, and the
reason that we're not sure of the name is. There's
not a lot of documentation, and that information is taken
from um court testimony that rose Field's children gave in
I think in nineteen eighties, so it was much later
and they were working from memory and they couldn't quite
recall the exact name. But that's why we're not sure
of it. But Swift's early effort with either Dainty or Delicia,
(25:10):
whichever it was called, did not sell particularly well. However,
they didn't abandon this idea. The company made another run
at peanut butter manufacturer, again using rose Field's partial hydrogenation
patent in Night and this is when they introduced it
as peter Pan, which of course became the first big
brand on the market, which is what I wanted desperately
(25:32):
as a child when we were eating peanut butter from
a tub that had to be stirred together. Now was
it because peter Pan was smooth and delicious or was
it because it was called peter Pan? Uh? It was
because it was like smooth and delicious and sugary and
not not so. The difference is not nearly as pronounced today,
(25:54):
but the texture of the organic sturren together peanut butter
from nineteen seven nine was like kind of dry and
chunky and didn't spread very well. Um, whereas like peter
Pan peanut butter was this magical sweet deliciousness because it's
also there's a fair amount of sugar and a lot
(26:14):
of and a lot of peanut butter's in addition to
the peanut part. So we'll talk about that in a minute. Yeah,
I'm pretty sure that I would go to my grandmother's
house and she would make us peanut butter and jelly sandwiches,
and they would be peanut butter. There would be Peter
Pan peanut butter on white bread with jelly, none of
which were appropriate things to eat at our house. There
(26:41):
was also another man who patent today food product just
a few weeks before rose Field, and his name was
Frank Stockton, the first pattern that actually used the phrase
peanut butter, and Stockton's patents described a full hydrogenation process,
which made for a less creamy product and one that
was more of a salad with a higher melting point.
He licensed his hydrogenation process to Hynes. He was producing
(27:03):
hydrogenated peanut butter as early as Yeah. Even when you
get into kind of more in depth stories, of how
peanut butter came to be what it is today. UM.
Frank Stockton often gets left out of the picture in
part because some uh, let's say that his full hydrogenation
process just it made for a peanut butter that was
(27:24):
not as naturally delicious because it was more solid, it
was harder to spread. Some would feel like it was
kind of a step back in terms of UM, you know,
consumer appeal. And rose Field and the Peter Pan Company,
you'll remember they were licensing his partial hydrogenation process, had
a pretty significant falling out in ninety two after some
(27:45):
changes in leadership at UM, the Swift Company, which owned
Peter Pan, the manufacturer, made a move to reduce the
fee that they were paying rose Field for licensing his
partial hydrogenation process, and he was not having that, and
the two ends he's went their separate ways, and then
rose Field started his own peanut butter company called Skippy. Uh.
(28:06):
The Swift Company, which again had been the parent to
Peter Pan, switched to a different hydrogenation process, which was
patented by a man named Leo Brown in two. And
Brown's patent is kind of interesting because, UM, a lot
of it really focuses on its prevention of the products
sticking to the roof of the consumer's mouse. They could
talks a lot about saliva and how it will factor
(28:27):
in with this different hydrogenation process. Rose Field further experimented
with peanut butter production by setting up a lab and
testing out a new system to try to get a smoother,
more palatable mixture. He started turning his peanut butter rather
than grinding it, which was the normal method, by then
dropping crushed nuts into the mixture. He invented chunky peanut butter,
(28:47):
which was introduced in ninety five and which I have
never cared for. Oh ha, ha ha ha, You're dead to me,
Tracy V. Wilson, because I'm all about the chunky peanut butter.
Um you and your smooth Peter. I'm sticking with Skippy,
I guess uh. Rose Field also introduced a chocolate peanut
(29:08):
butter combo in the form of choc nut Butter, although
this product never really caught on, but he was kind
of ahead of his time because five years later, the
Reese's Cup was introduced and it kind of went off
like gangbusters. In five rose Field sold Skippy to Best
Foods for six million dollars uh. Which also this also
(29:29):
was a company that makes Hellman's mayonnaise products. Yeah uh
so also in nive there was a Kentucky man named
William T. Young, and he sold his company, which at
the time was called Big Top Peanut Butter, to Procter
and Gamble, and Procter and Gamble reformulated Young's recipe pretty significantly.
They used alternate oils to peanut oils in the hydrogenation process.
(29:53):
Then they started adding sugar and molasses to their products.
This new version of the recipe was rebranded as IF
and competitors took notice. Soon afterward, other peanut butter manufacturers
started adding sweeteners and non peanut oils to their products,
and then the Food and Drug Administration got involved. Uh.
(30:14):
They were watching this kind of shift in peanut butter
from being just peanuts and peanut oil to peanuts, peanut oil,
other oils, and sugars, and they were not okay with
a product that included non peanut ingredients being labeled as
peanut butter. The FDA stance was it a product needed
to be peanuts to be marketed as peanut butter. But manufacturers,
(30:37):
on the other hand, thought that was a much more
reasonable number, and thus began twelve years of legal back
and forth about what percentage of peanuts has to be
in peanut butter for it's really be peanut butter. Finally
in the FDA and manufacturers settled on nine as the
amount of peanuts a jar of peanut butter must contain. Yeah,
(31:00):
and it was one of those things when I was
doing my research. I didn't include it here because it
gets very mathey in a hurry. But a lot of
the arguments were like, Okay, but if we include this
many peanuts and this much peanut oil, then we don't
have any space to put molasses in, So that's not
really a workable recipe for us. Like it was all
sort of A lot of their argument was science based
and like what could actually fit in the recipe and
(31:22):
still make it palatable and competitive on the market, and
what consumers were used to eating. Um, So, since the
nineteen seventies, there have, of course, I'm sure all of
our listeners will remember one or another recall or a
shifting health trend that have damaged one big peanut butter
brand or another for a time. But peanut butter just
(31:43):
as a food has really remained a staple in pantries,
certainly throughout the US and in other parts of the world. Yeah.
I think one of the I know, one of the
reasons that we ate it so much as a child
was that even uh, even though they were they were
buying organic from a food co op, it was like
not a brand of it was like a tub of
(32:05):
industrial sized, super cheap. We can make a million sandwhich
is out of this peanut butter that had to be
stirred together with this bachelor. Oh yeah, there are so
many tales of like, uh, you know, I'm sure anybody
in their friends circle will be like, oh, when I
was in college and super broke, I would just buy
like a jar of peanut butter and a loaf of
bread and that would have to last week for the week.
(32:26):
And even famous people often love to tell their like
I was so broke peanut butter stories that are basically
the same story of this is what sustained me when
I wasn't able to, you know, afford more um variety
in my diet. So peanut butter has saved a lot
of people from being hungry, that's for sure. And I
thought to close out it might be fun just to
(32:46):
share a handful of fun facts about peanut butter. By
the time he retired to start off J'SA. Rose Field
had ten food patents. Yeah, he really did some interesting
things in terms of the food industry. He paid his
workers all out more than than most other companies were.
He invented the wide mouth peanut butter jar. Uh. He
was very into uh kind of moving and shaking and
(33:08):
trying new things. Um. In n seven, the New Yorker
published its first peanut butter cartoon, and that was by
some a sure sign that the product had become a
cultural institution. To make its well bounced jar of peanut butter,
you'll need about five and forty peanuts. That's so when
you mentioned earlier, if you saw my Rye Grand when
you were talking about possibly experimenting with planting peanuts, it's
(33:31):
one of those things where you have to plant so
many to get a little bit of a crop. So well,
and if my memory is accurately, pretty much grew them
and snacked on them, and it's hirely possible that I'm
conflating them with some other root food that we grew.
U two was the first year that hydrogenated peanut butter
(33:53):
out sold natural peanut butter. And while peanut butter is
often seen as a staple for people with limited budget,
fancy peanut butters are now a large part of the market.
I will confess I buy fancy peanut butter. I do sometimes,
but every once in a while, um, I'll be on
the peanut butter. I'll looking at the sort of you know,
(34:13):
organics and the naturals, and I'll look at Brian and
be like, not this time, I gotta go with the
the old standards for sugar in them, because they are
very delicious and they're kind of um. There's a lot
of nostalgia that's part of it. One acre of peanuts
translates to roughly thirty peanut butter sandwiches. About eight percent
of today's peanut butters are hydrogenated, and to be labeled
(34:37):
as natural peanut butter, the product can contain natural sweeteners
and salt, but no stabilizers. So that's why a natural
peanut butters often have to be um stirred. Now, there
are a lot and I haven't looked into the science
of this, but have you seen these where it's like
it's natural peanut butter that you do not have to
(34:58):
stir like the label will state no stirring needed. How
are they doing that? I have seen that, but I
have not bought them because I have this weird nostalgia
for stirring the peanut butter because of my weirdo organic childhood. Uh.
In Delta Airlines distributed sixty nine point six million packs
(35:21):
of peanuts on its flights. Related to that and to
what I'm going to say next, I was on a
flight very recently where there were no peanuts served because
there was someone on the flight who had a severe
peanut allergy. And it turned out that was my seat mate.
Oh my goodness. Uh. As many as six out of
a thousand people in the United States have peanut allergies,
which is really sad because, in addition to the fact
(35:42):
that it means you can't eat this pretty cheap and
tasty staple like often peanut allergies are just deadly, which
is why they were not served on the entire airplane
because there was one person with a severe allergy. Yeah,
and it's one of those things. I'm sure anybody who's
listening that's dealt with peanut allergy, and even bills that
haven't probably no peanuts and peanut powder show up in
(36:05):
some unusual places. It's kind of like gluten, where you don't.
It's not always in the places you automatically think it
would be, so that it's very restrictive. It makes me
sad because I love peanut butter so much. I wish
everybody could chow down on it. Yeah, and I know
that there are people who are really against the idea
of banning peanuts from a place because of allergies, But seriously,
an airplane, Like, what are you going to do if
(36:26):
you have a medical emergency in the eight when you're
trapped in a steel tube her Ling group space um.
Peanuts actually contribute more than four billion dollars to the
US economy every single year, and Americans spend almost eight
hundred million dollars a year on peanut butter. Uh. The
(36:48):
average American eats about six pounds that's roughly two point
seven kgs of peanuts and peanut butter products each year.
I'm really quite confident in all seriousness that you could
triple that number for me, and we'll just leave that there. Well,
in my weirdo organic childhood, one of the things that
(37:08):
we would have for a snack would be uh some
some peanut butter from the tub of peanut butter that
had to be starred together with a bachelor. Um and
and honey smashed together in a cup. Who young? I
still do that sometimes, um and I usually my breakfast
lately has been peanut butter on a fruit, like peanut
(37:30):
butter on apple or peanut butter on banana. It's good stuff.
I'm a fan of peanut butter. Uh So with that,
and now with my salivating, I will read a little
bit of listener mail. Let's do that. First is a
brief emale from our listener Brian, and he says, I
was in Columbia a couple of months ago on a
(37:52):
business trip, and my host mentioned their problem with invasive hippos,
which the drug lord Pablo Escobar has smuggled into the country.
They escaped years ago from his private zoo and have
been breeding in the wild. As with many invasive species,
they are thriving in South America. And then he links
us to a BBC article on the problem. And that's
in reference to our recent two part episode on the
(38:15):
American effort to bring hippos to the US to become
Lake Bacon. But I also liked including it with this
episode because, as we said, peanuts are not native to
North America, yet they imported and they did not take
over except in my heart. I also wanted to give
a shout out to our listener Juliana. She is traveling
through the UK and she has sent us a couple
of really cool and gorgeous postcards and I just wanted
(38:37):
to thank her for those. She sent us one from
Ramsey Garden in Edinburgh, and she also sent us one
from Letchley Park. So thank you so much, Juliana. It's
like we get to travel the world with you and another. Uh.
If you would like to write us, you can do
so at History Podcast at house to Works dot com.
You can also connect with us at Facebook dot com
(38:57):
slash mist in History, on Twitter, at mys in history,
at missed in History dot tumbler dot com, and at
pinterest dot com slash missed in History. You would like
to purchase some stubbu missed in History class goodies, you
can do that at miss in History dot spreadshirt dot com.
And then we have at least one new shirt that's
gone into the story recently. Uh. And if you would
like to learn a little bit more about what we
(39:18):
talked about today. You can go to our parents site,
how stuff Works, Type in the words peanut butter in
the search bar and you will get an article called
what if I ate only peanut butter for the rest
of my life? Well, that sounds delicious, don't do it.
But if you would like to visit us on the web,
that's at missed in history dot com. You can find
there an archive of all of our episodes, all of
(39:39):
the show notes from the episodes that Tracy and I
have been doing for the last couple of years. You'll
also find some other goodies at missed in History, So
please come and visit us at missed in history dot
com and how stubb Works dot com for more on
this and thousands of other topics. How stuff works dot
com set in the int
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