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Creamy & Crunchy
An Informal History
of Peanut Butter, the
All-American Food
by Jon Krampner
Columbia University Press
Peanut butter is the lazy person’s any meal. The average child will consume 1,500 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches before he graduates high school; 90% of households keep jars in their cupboards; and the average US consumer eats about 6 pounds of it a year. Midwesterners like it salty and New Englanders like it sweet, but not as sweet as those in the South.
There’s even a month devoted to the spreadable protein. November — a month known for overeating — is also called “Peanut Butter Lovers’ Month.”
A month in honor of peanut butter might sound ludicrous to you, but certainly not to author Jon Krampner, who has penned an exhaustive book about the snack. In the same vein as one-subject books “Cod,” “Banana” and “Salt,” Krampner’s “Creamy & Crunchy” aims to trace the rise of peanut butter in America and in doing so tell a greater story about how a mere snack shaped and reflects our shared history.
The story begins over 3,000 years ago in South America, where peanut plants were first domesticated. South American Indians ground peanuts into sticky paste and made non-alcoholic drinks from them.
The Latin name for peanuts, Arachis hypogaea, means “weed whose fruit grows underground.” Peanuts aren’t actually nuts, but legumes that are more closely related to peas and clover than walnuts and cashews.
Spanish and Portuguese explorers brought peanut plants from South America to Europe in the 16th century. The peanut made its way to Africa, and then to the United States on slave ships landing on the East Coast in the 17th century.
Peanuts were initially associated with slaves and viewed as a “poor person’s food.” During rationing in the Civil War, peanut oil replaced lard and olive oil and remained a lower-class food item until peanut butter was introduced.
The invention of peanut butter remains a mystery, but it’s clear that the origins were far from palate-sticking and delicious.
Peanut butter was initially prescribed as a medicine (doctors doled it out as a laxative, when it is quite the opposite) and many churches urged people to eat it instead of meat.
Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, of the cereal fame, became the first “peanut butter pioneer” when he prescribed peanut butter at his sanitoriums in the 1880s. But his peanut butter tasted terrible and bore little resemblance to the kind we eat now.
George A. Bayle became the first man to manufacture peanut butter on a large scale. He also began the first of a long tradition of advertising peanut butter with the slogan: “A sandwich a day keeps your children at play.”
(It’s interesting to note that George Washington Carver’s role in the making of peanut butter was largely legend. “Almost none [of his story] is true,” writes Krampner.)
Peanut butter was rapidly adopted between 1890 and 1900. And it began, unlike its peanut predecessor, as a dish for the 1%.
“Dainty tearooms and high-class restaurants proudly announced that their salads, sandwiches and soups were made with peanut butter,” says one food historian Krampner interviewed.
But as the prices dropped (and as machinery became more efficient in the planting and shucking of peanut plants) and sandwiches became more popular, peanut butter entered the food world as the everyman’s go-to snack.
In 1923, Heinz marketed its own brand of hydrogenated peanut butter, meaning the oil stayed solid at room temperature and could be kept outside a refrigerator. Peter Pan hit in 1928, followed by Skippy in 1933 and then Jif in 1958.
The Great Depression pushed peanut butter into another stratum as people clamored for a quick, cheap and filling food. World War II brought heightened love for the spread, as it became easy to ship overseas and meat rationing made peanut butter (in all its incarnations) a go-to meal.
Production rose from 200 million pounds in 1936 to 325 million pounds in 1947 and then to 400 million pounds in 1958.
Peanut butter, however, hit a few road blocks on its rise to the top. In the 1970s, peanut butter brands came under fire for not using enough peanuts in their recipes. The FDA ordered a standard for peanut butter: At least 90% of it had to be made up of peanuts.
Peanut butter got a bit of a shock last year when a significant portion of the peanut crops were decimated by droughts and high heats causing prices to jump. Luckily, we can’t go to long without our favorite spread. This year, farmers are expected to bring in two-thirds more peanuts than they did in 2011.