Peanut Butter Passion

    (published in the Baton Rouge Advocate...back in the early 1980s)

Over 700 phobias are known to mankind, and Arachibutyrophobia is one of them.  Yes, there really is a fear of getting peanut butter stuck to the roof of your mouth.

Yet, it is quite obvious that this fear is hardly of consequence.  In the United States, 117 companies produce peanut butter, and approximately 630 million pounds of the tan spread were consumed in 1979 alone.  That is roughly 50 ounces per person!  

Peanut butter is packaged in everything from six-ounce snack jars to colossal five-pound plastic pails.  It easily outsells all the jams, jellies and preserves combined, making peanut butter the 14^th most purchased supermarket item.

Although peanut butter is near the top of America’s favorite food list, it is but a rookie to the diet.  After all, unlike sap used in maple syrup, peanut butter does not merely flow from trees.  It took a long time in reaching the sandwich spread.

It all started with the peanut, Arachis hypogaea L.  Recent scientific research has pinpointed a small region in eastern Bolivia as the likely birth of the peanut, way back in 2100 B.C. 

However, the more modern strain is traced to Peru, where archaeologists have discovered jars of peanuts and remnants of peanut-shaped pottery from 750 B.C.  Sixteenth century Spanish explorers seeking gold in Peru, found these peanuts instead.  They took this ‘gold mine’ back to their kingdom, and later traded peanuts to Africans for spices and elephant tusks.  Africans fell in love with their ‘goobers,’ which were believed to have souls. 

In parts of Africa where gold was plentiful, local craftsmen hammered the gold into nuggets then shaped them into the form of peanuts.  These peanut nuggets later became the gifts of tribal chiefs to warriors at great festivals and feasts.

Naturally, when Negro slaves were brought to the New World, peanuts were transported as well.  Peanuts had finally reached American shores.

As the popularity of the peanut grew after the Civil War, Dr. George Washington Carver and others began experimenting with it in order to find other uses. 

  Lo and behold, in 1890, a little-known St. Louis physician discovered peanut butter by tossing a handful of peanuts into a grinder.

Although South Americans had produced a peanut paste mixed with honey and cocoa several centuries earlier, the St. Louis doctor is credited with creating the first widely-used peanut butter.

Soon peanut butter was recommended to invalids because of its high protein value and low carbohydrate content.  But it was seldom eaten at first due to limited quantity from a scarcity of manufacturing equipment, and an inflated market price.

Today, one of the foremost reasons for peanut butter’s wide use is its relative low cost among not only protein foods, but all foods.  It still costs only eight cents for the two tablespoons commonly used to make a sandwich.

An important decision facing the sandwich maker is, of course, whether to use smooth or chunky.  The latter variety simply combines small bits of roasted peanuts into its contents.  Industry figures point to a 3-to-1 choice for smooth over its counterpart.

The late Senator Hubert Humphrey was content on lunching on his own creation—toast literally drowned in peanut butter and topped with bologna, cheddar cheese, lettuce, mayonnaise, and ketchup.

“Give me smooth or crunchy,” Humphrey said.  “I’m not fussy.  I just love peanut butter!”

Another Senator, Lowell Weicker of Connecticut, is a skin-diving enthusiast as well as a peanut butter enthusiast.  His claim to fame, other than politics, was eating peanut butter snacks 50 feet under water.

While touring an undersea lab off the Grand Bahama Islands, Weicker claimed, “It was nice and quiet down there, the company was fine, and for breakfast I had peanut butter and mayonnaise on a cracker.  It was just heaven!”

Peanut butter started to gain popularity around 1900.  Peanut roasters, blanchers and grinders were placed on the market for home use.  A few years later, peanut butter was commercially made and sold by the pound.  Grocers used to ladle it out of tubs, and by 1910, the first packaged brand name peanut butter appeared in colorful metal pails—now collectors’ items.

 

Prior to the 1920s, the entire content of peanut butter was peanuts and a bit of salt.  A new development was then introduced—stabilizers—which prevented the separation inside the jar.

When the Peanut Butter Manufacturers Association was organized around 1940, improvements were made in methods of roasting, peanut grading, spreadability, extending the product’s shelf life and lessening the chance of peanut butter sticking to the roof of the mouth.

 

In recent years, there has been somewhat of a revival of the pre-1920s product.  Most health food stores sell this item, which contains 100% peanuts and a layer of oil on the top.  By the mid-1970s, a few companies had developed countertop grinders for home use.

Peanut butter has been a popular staple in this country because of its pleasing flavor, easy use in cooking and refusal to spoil.

Political analyst William F. Buckley, Jr., once listed his life values and placed peanut butter No. 5 behind God, his family, his country and Johann Sebastian Bach.

If you think peanut butter is ‘for the birds,’ you are right.  According to experiments at the Georgia Test Station, all birds love peanut butter, whether insect eaters or seed eaters.

Of the 300,000 tons of seed consumed annually by birds, 100 million pounds is peanut butter.  Naturally, they also prefer a bit of additive to render it less sticky.  What bird likes to have peanut butter stuck to the roof of its beak?

Whether feeding a child or a flock of birds, there is little question about peanut butter nutrition.  The scrumptious spread is 26 percent protein—a percentage higher than milk, cheese, eggs or fish sticks.  In fact, peanut butter contains more protein for the money than any food except dry beans, and also delivers 11 of the 13 mineral elements essential to the human diet.

The high nutritional value of peanut butter has been especially appealing to athletes.  Mile runner Dick Buerkle, names peanut butter as a major factor in the new indoor record of 3 minutes and 54.9 seconds he set in 1978.

 

Golfer Al Geiberger is known as “the peanut butter kid.”  He credits peanut butter as the stimulus in capturing well over $1 million in prize money over the past two decades.

“It’s my secret weapon,” announces Geiberger as he chomps on a peanut butter sandwich while preparing for the final holes of a round!