SYMHC Classics: A Brief History of Peanut Butter

This 2015 episode delves into how peanut butter got its name in the 18th century, but it's been around in some form for hundreds and hundreds of years. Its modern history features changes to the recipe and even a little litigation with the FDA.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday, everybody. Not long ago, listener Tory asked if
we could do an episode on the history of the
peanut butter sandwich. We have not done an episode on
that before, but we have done an episode on the
history of peanut butter, so we are sharing that one today.
And if based on what I just said, you're curious
about the peanut butter sandwich. Like a lot of foods,
its origins are unclear, but the first written reference we

(00:25):
have to it is by Julia Davis Chandler in nineteen
o one. Well, now I want a peanut butter sandwich.
But also just to note that the FDA's final determination
regarding partially hydrogenated oils came out shortly after we originally
recorded this episode, and that FDA removed trans FATS designation
of generally recognized as safe that's g r a S

(00:49):
for food and phased out its use in food. So
if you're wondering why we didn't mention that, that's why
this episode originally came out in July, So enjoy. Welcome
to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of
I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm

(01:14):
Holly Fry and I'm trade Peep 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, but I do love it deeply. You know,

(01:37):
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 with peanut butter and bacon. If you've never tried

(01:59):
this culinary to 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
talk about those guys and where they fit into the
whole thing in terms of the history of peanut butter.

(02:21):
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 taling of itself, we're gonna talk a little
bit about just how modern peanut butter is actually made. Unsurprisingly,

(02:42):
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
on average a hundred fifteen to a hundred forty pounds,

(03:02):
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

(03:23):
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

(03:44):
of penetrating the soil begins between forty five and sixty
days after planting, and at that point the peanut will
start to grow in 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

(04:05):
modern approach to this, there's a digger shaker which is
attached to a tractor and it's used to cut 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

(04:27):
of the big mechanism, and 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, because I

(04:48):
remember like pulling up plants that had peanuts with lots
of dirt underneath them. But it's possible that that was
someone else's farm and I was on a 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 are pulled up

(05:11):
in a harvest ster that picks up and separates the
peanut part from the dried vine 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. That's a problem

(05:32):
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, even though they are not

(05:52):
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, foreign material that might still be in there
after the cleaning and shaking, the maturity of the peanuts,
as well as their moisture contents. Next, the peanuts go

(06:15):
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, so a digital

(06:37):
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 contents. 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 cold storage, and that

(06:59):
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 blancher 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 butter plant can also buy peanuts

(07:22):
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 their oil contents. And then after roasting,

(07:44):
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 peanut butter goes into jars to be

(08:06):
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 of organic peanut butter that you had

(08:27):
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 not accurate. In fact, both

(08:48):
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 their 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 peanut butter is made. But as to

(09:10):
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 and alfalfa and clover. Peanuts got

(09:33):
their scientific name iraqous hypogaea in the eighteenth century from
carl Naeus, 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. Chamber.
So this literally means underground weed. But they're delicious um.
But before they ever got a scientific name, peanuts were

(09:56):
growing in South America. The place peanuts are believe you too,
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 ninety four thousand square kilometers in tropical

(10:17):
areas of Brazil, Bolivia, and Paraguay. Peanuts there 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 eastern coast that date back to
five hundred and one hundred BC where people live on

(10:40):
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 that much like today's peanut butters, there
were some South and Amrican cultures that were grinding up

(11:01):
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 to
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 up the Pacific coast into Mexico,

(11:22):
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 that they have
in North America. Spanish also carried peanuts across the Pacific

(11:47):
Ocean to the Malayan Archipelago in the fifteen hundreds, and
by six o eight peanuts were in China. Uh. And
we certainly know that peanuts have become part of many
Asian cuisines, much to my palates delay. Uh. There's evidence
of use of ground peanuts in West African cuisine dating
back five hundred years, and they traveled to Africa we

(12:08):
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. I'm

(12:28):
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. Uh. And unfortunately, Uh,

(12:51):
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 predates the timeline
most commonly related to peanut butter, more properly known in

(13:12):
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 States though we're

(13:35):
peanut butter as we know it came into existence. But
before we get to the American peanut butter story, do
you don't have a word from a sponsor? Sure? So,
getting into the tail of American peanut butter, The earliest

(13:56):
known American peanut butters were made with a combination of
Spanish Virginia peanuts, both still very popular today. Uh. 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

(14:16):
and fashionable, But that really didn't last for very long
as peanut butter dropped in price as people got better
at making it more efficiently. It became a staple of
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

(14:38):
in almost every pantry, which is a very short period
of time. But going back to the early introduction of
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

(14:58):
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
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

(15:19):
breaking down the oils because he thought that was gonna
upset digestion. Kellogg applied for what's generally considered to be
the first peanut butter patent on November four of eight,
although his invention was called a food compound rather than
peanut butter. It specified a manner of turning nuts into
a paste for eating. He filed two more patents for

(15:39):
similar food products in eight and 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. Another player in this
this story is George Bail, who was a cracker salesman

(16:01):
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 eight and Bail claimed for many years that he
was the original manufacturer of peanut butter, and his advertising
included that claim. Bail is sometimes being credited as being

(16:23):
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 up Kellogg's claim in the form

(16:44):
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 thistinctive variation, because
the roasting really does bring out a much different flavor.

(17:05):
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,
peanut butter was an attraction at the St. Louis World's Fair,
and shortly thereafter beech Nuts began manufacturing it uh And

(17:28):
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 into the peanut butter game.
Hines produced peanut butter until it was crowded out of

(17:50):
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. There were,
you know, agricultural communities that basically shut down completely, but

(18:14):
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
kind of break down the agricultural system there and they
left farmers looking for another crop that they could grow,

(18:35):
and for a lot of them, peanuts filled that void.
So people often credit George Washington Carver with inventing peanut butter,
and this whole Bowl Weevil inspired switch to planting peanuts
instead of cotton kind of figures into that legend. Carver
was a proponent of peanuts and there are many uses.
And he did teach farmers, particularly black farmers, about crop rotation,

(18:56):
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
one of the incorrect claims he made was that peanuts

(19:16):
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
did not travel well. So hydrogenations raised the melting point

(19:41):
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 stir
together cost the most in the National Peanut Butter Manufacturers Association,
which today is the peanut and that processors association was formed.

(20:03):
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 a passage from John Crampnor's book Creamy
and Crunchy and Informal History of Peanut Butter, the All

(20:24):
American Food rather than sort of try 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
oil is hydrogenated, two things happen. Hydrogen atoms attached themselves

(20:47):
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
replacing double bonds with single bonds, hydrogenation creates a more

(21:09):
tightly packed crystalline structure and 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
because they are the villains of modern nutrition and they
are part of this process. They're created when the ground

(21:31):
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
you could never really work out hard enough to activate

(21:52):
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
presence of transpats and peanut butter falls well below the

(22:14):
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 trans fats
than you would get in many, many servings of peanut butter.

(22:34):
So it really is kind of a trace amount. So
now that we've got the science lesson out of the way,
let's have a brief word from a sponsor, and then
we'll talk about one of the most important men in
the peanut butter story. So a gentleman named Joseph rose

(22:56):
Field figures very prominently in peanut butter history. On April
fifth one, he filed for a patent for his process
of partially hydrogenating peanut butter to stabilize it, and in
ninety three 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

(23:19):
and in a short lived brand introduced by Swift was
named either Dainty or Delicia, and it was making 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

(23:41):
think in nineteen eighties, so it was much later and
they were working for 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, 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 pattern

(24:03):
in 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 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

(24:25):
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. But the texture
of the organic sturn together peanut butter from nineteen seventy
nine was like kind of dry and chunky and didn't
spread very well. Um, whereas like peter Pan peanut butter

(24:50):
was this magical sweet deliciousness because it's also there's a
fair amount of sugar and a lot of and a
lot of peanut butters in addition to the parts. 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

(25:13):
appropriate things to eat at our house. There 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

(25:34):
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, who was producing 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

(25:55):
often gets left out of the picture, in part because
some say that his full hydrogenation process just it made
for a peanut butter that was 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 remember they

(26:18):
were licensing his partial hydrogenation process, had a pretty significant
falling out in ninety two after some 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 uh, and the two entities

(26:40):
went their separate ways, and then rose Field started his
own peanut butter company called Skippy. Uh. 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

(27:00):
focuses on its prevention of the products sticking to the
roof of the consumer's mouse. The it talks a lot
about saliva and how it will factor 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 churning his peanut butter rather than grinding it,

(27:20):
which was the normal method, by then dropping crushed nuts
into the mixture. He invented chunky peanut butter, which was
introduced in Nive and which I have never cared for.
Oh ha, ha ha, You're dead to me, Tracy V. Wilson,
because I'm all about the chunky peanut butter. Um, you

(27:41):
and your smooth Peter. I'm sticking with Skippy, I guess uh.
Rose Field also introduced a chocolate peanut 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
nine five, rose Field sold Skippy to Best Foods for

(28:04):
six million dollars. Uh which also this also was a
company that makes Hellman's mayonnaise products. Yeah, uh so. Also
in ninety five 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

(28:24):
Procter and Gamble reformulated Young's recipe pretty significantly. They used
alternate oils to peanut oils in the hydrogenation process. Then
they started adding sugar and molasses to their products. This
new version of the recipe was rebranded as Jiff and
competitors took notice. Soon afterward, other peanut butter manufacturers started

(28:44):
adding sweeteners and non peanut oils to their products, and
then the Food and Drug Administration got involved. Uh. 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

(29:07):
peanut butter. The FDA stance was that a product needed
to be peanuts to be marketed as peanut butter. But manufacturers,
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 to really be peanut butter. Finally,

(29:29):
in nine the FDA and manufacturers settled on nine of
the amount of peanuts a jar of peanut butter must contain. Yeah,
And it was one of those things that 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

(29:51):
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 what could actually fit in the recipe and still
make it palatable and competitive on the market. And what
consumers were used to eating. Um. So since the nineteen seventies,

(30:11):
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 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

(30:33):
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
industrial sized, super cheap. We can make a million sandwhich
is out of this peanut butter that had to be
stirred together with a bachelor. Oh yeah, there are so

(30:55):
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.
And even famous people often love to tell they're 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

(31:18):
in my diet. So peanut butter has saved a lot
of people from being hungry, that's for sure. Uh. And
I thought to close out it might be fun just
to share a handful of fun facts about peanut butter.
By the time he retired to start off, Josip rose
Field had ten food patents. Yeah, he really did some
interesting things in terms of the food industry. He paid

(31:39):
his workers a lot more than than most other companies were.
He admitted the wide mouth peanut butter jar. Uh. He
was very into uh kind of moving and shaking and
trying new things. Um. In 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.

(31:59):
To make gets 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 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 tirely possible that I'm

(32:23):
conflating them with some other root food that we grew.
Is the first year that hydrogenated peanut butter out sold
natural peanut butter, and while peanut butter is often seen
as a staple for people with limited budgets, fancy peanut
butters are now a large part of the market. I

(32:44):
will confess I buy a 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,
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 them because they are very
delicious and they're kind of um. There's a lot of

(33:04):
nostalgia that's part of it. One acre of peanuts translates
to roughly thirty peanut butter sandwiches. About eight of today's
peanut butters are hydrogenated and to be labeled as natural
peanut butter. The product can contain natural sweeteners and salt,
but no stabilizers. So that's why a natural peanut butters

(33:25):
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 stir, Like
the label will state like no stirring needed. How are
they doing that? I have seen that, but I have
not bought them because I have this weird estalgia for

(33:48):
stirring the peanut butter because of my weirdo organic childhood.
Uh In Delta Airlines distributed sixty nine point six million
packs 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

(34:09):
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 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,

(34:31):
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 people that
haven't probably no peanuts and peanut powder show up in
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

(34:53):
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 id
of banning peanuts from a place because of allergies, But seriously,
an airplane, like, what are you gonna do if you
have a medical emergency in the eighth when you're trapped
in a steel tube her lying space. Um. Peanuts actually

(35:15):
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 average American
eats about six pounds. That's roughly two point seven kgs
of peanuts and peanut butter products each year. I'm really

(35:36):
quite confident in all seriousness that you could triple that
number for me and we'll just leave that there. Well. So,
in my weirdo organic childhood, one of the things that
we would have for a snack would be uh, some
some peanut butter from the tub of peanut butter that
had to be started together with a bachelor, um and

(35:56):
and honey smashed together in a cup. Who young with this?
I still do that sometimes, um and I. Usually my
breakfast lately has been peanut butter on a fruit, like
peanut butter on apple or peanut butter on banana. It's
good stuff. I'm a fan of peanut butter. Thank you

(36:22):
so much for joining us today for this Saturday classic.
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(36:44):
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