Peanut Butter

It's complicated.

Let’s discuss the highly controversial subject of peanut butter.

Photo, Dan Saelinger

Veteran food critic Florence Fabricant once called peanut butter “the pâté of childhood,” which is the kind of thing that seriously pisses off the French.

We’re not talking about the US lunchroom wars waged over nut bans nor the disturbing rise of peanut allergies; today, our attention is focused on something much, much bigger: the global anti-peanut butter agenda.

Until recently, one could divide the deep feelings around peanut butter into two warring camps: North Americans who can’t live without it and everyone else on the planet who thinks it tastes like shit and sees it as a totem for dangerous American dietary habits and cultural hegemony, but I digress.

If you grew up in the New World, you were raised on the stuff: PB&Js in bag lunches made with love by mom, afterschool snacks wolfed down by starving teens, the affordable shelf-stable protein found in the otherwise bare cupboards of every 20-something from Austin to Toronto. We enjoy it slathered on pancakes and crackers, in smoothies and right out of the jar when you’re high or after failing to impress that vegan boy and could kill for a burger, but all you had was Jiff.

Those food memories are the stuff of nostalgic reverie. But if you weren’t raised on it, well, it’s like tasting Vegemite for the first time: gag-inducing. Or at least, that’s how it used to be.

Blech.

Ze butter from ze pee nut est dégoûtant! Said every French person everywhere while making this exact face.

Enter the global protein obsession fuelled by TikTok, toxic masculinity, and stupid. Suddenly, everyone in the Western world needs more protein because some muscle-bound ‘roid abuser told them so; it turns out peanut butter is a great way to do that. Who knew? North Americans did, bitch.

Do I feel smug? Am I having a moment after years, decades even, of Europeans turning their noses up in horror, telling me how utterly vile the stuff is, and then questioning me as a person for enjoying it? Yes. Yes, I am. Because after taking the hits for Team USA, this is my time to shine.

A quick side note about that: back in the ancient days of Bush Jr. and the Iraq war, America was really hated, and I mean way more than usual; consequently, anything associated with it was too, and what could be more American than peanut butter? Sometimes, when enduring a rant about how disgusting peanut butter was, I knew that was just code for US foreign policy and, if we’re being honest, by extension, Americans.¹

Back around 25 years ago, when I moved to France for the first time, peanut butter was impossible to find. Its frustrating scarcity, how to locate a jar, and the rumors of some little shop in a far-off arrondissement that might carry it were the subject of more than one expat apéro hour. If you flew home, you returned with jars of it stashed in your checked bag — and if you were me, bags of Reece’s Pieces for your French sister-in-law who, despite her better judgment, developed a love of them during her year abroad.

Today, however, I’m pleased to report that the dark days of global peanut butter loathing are in the rearview mirror. You can find Skippy at grocery store chains like Le Clerc in France, artisanal no salt organic with oil on top, at the Coop in Switzerland. It’s a global peanut revolution, friends. It’s not on par with North American consumption² — which is alarming, and maybe we should dial it back — but still, it’s nice that I can get my hands on a jar without 12 hours in coach each way.  

But why did peanut butter occupy such an important place at the North American table but not the rest of the world?  It seems like we invented it (doesn’t it always), but that achievement goes to the Inca. Hundreds of years later, the man who brought it to our attention was none other than the eugenics-loving, forced sterilization, female genital mutilating, circumcising boys without anesthesia, anti-masturbation crusader, piece of hateful work, John Harvey Kellogg.

A Seventh-Day Adventist, the good doctor, believed in the benefits of a vegetarian diet, and moreover, that meat was a sinful sexual stimulant leading to masturbation (see above: mutilating the sexual organs of children), so peanut butter and breakfast cereal it was!

Meat rationing during WWs I and II also helped boost the popularity of peanuts as a cheap protein alternative. Then, in 1921, a Californian (we’re always ahead of the curve), Joseph Rosefield, applied a chemical process called partial hydrogenation to peanut butter, and overnight, the age-old problem of how to keep the oil from separating was solved – neither Crisco nor margarine would be possible without this clever bit of food engineering. So, thank you, science? Old Joe would go on to found Skippy and create what remains to this day, the deeply divisive option of crunchy.

And because nothing in American history is untouched by our shameful legacy of slavery, enter the humble peanut.

Let us all take a moment to salute one George Washington Carver. Born enslaved in Missouri, he trained as a botanist and, in 1896, took over the agriculture department at the Tuskegee Institute, where he developed hundreds of uses for the tiny legume.

 But why the peanut, you might ask? Because he was awesome.

Carver in his laboratory, circa 1935. Hulton Archive / Getty Images..

“I came here solely for the benefit of my people,” he wrote to colleagues on his arrival at Tuskegee.

During this time, Black farmers, most of whom were cotton sharecroppers, were trapped in perpetual debt to white plantation owners. (See above: our nation’s eternal shame.)

Carver knew that cotton stripped the soil of its nutrients, but landowners prohibited Black farmers from planting less profitable (and life-sustaining for the farmers) food crops. Carver experimented with plants like peanuts and sweet potatoes that could replenish the nitrogen that cotton had leached and help Black farmers feed their families. In classes, conferences and county fairs, Carver showed often packed crowds how to raise these crops.

The Feminist Kitchen

has a longer post about him if you want, and you do, to know more.

 I raise my jar of Jiff to you, sir; thank you, Dr. Carver, for promoting peanuts all across the South so that I can virtue signal my occasional vegetarianism yet still feel full.

And finally, because, again, science — Studies show a 75% chance that if you drop a slice of peanut-buttered bread, it will fall face down. But you knew that already.

1. Fun story: During the time of the Iraq war, we were hiking on top of a windswept mountain in the middle of Switzerland, when we stopped for rest and a bite at a small farm serving plates of cheese and cured meats. Charming, right? It was, right up until the farmer’s daughter overheard me speaking English and announced (in French) that she refused to speak English because she hated America and Americans, all whilst the other hikers listened on, nodding and munching in agreement. Good times.

2. Americans eat three pounds of peanut butter per person every year – enough PB to coat the floor of the Grand Canyon. Yum?