Peanut Butter Has No Nuts, No Butter

One dictionary’s definition of peanut butter describes it as “a brown, oily paste made from peanuts that are a good source of protein, healthy fats, fiber and vitamins.” It’s a staple in our diet, and Americans spend $800 million on peanut butter every year.

Even though peanut butter is popular and healthy, it suffers from an identity crisis. Calling it a paste or spread is more accurate since it contains no butter. The majority of peanut eaters think they are consuming nuts, but they actually are eating legumes.

Peanuts grow underground and are inside pods similar to peas and beans that are other members of the legume family. Nuts grow on trees.

Peanuts we eat today originated from strains that grew wild thousands of years ago in South American forests. Archeologists found evidence that ancient Incas ate a form of peanut butter when they mashed wild peanuts into a paste.  

The oval peanut seed was roasted, salted and eaten as a snack food long before peanut butter arrived and later joined with jelly to become a popular sandwich. Its present form can be traced to the last part of the 19th century.

 

Peanut butter, as we know it now, started in 1890 when a St. Louis physician developed a peanut paste for his patients who had bad teeth. The doctor, whose name was lost in historical records, wanted to give his patients a nutritious food that was easy to chew. In 1922, entrepreneur and inventor Joseph L. Rosefield patented a churning process that made peanut butter smoother and kept the oil from separating.

The Swift & Company was the first business to pay royalties to Rosefield to use his churning process in 1928. The company and its brand later took the name Peter Pan. It remains among the top three biggest selling brands of peanut butter. The other two leading brands are Skippy and Jif.

Rosefield started selling Skippy brand peanut butter in 1932. That was ten years after he invented the process that made Peter Pan a success. Two years later he came out with the first crunchy style spread and took the lead away from Peter Pan.

Coming late into what could be called the peanut butter wars, Proctor & Gamble stared selling Jif peanut butter in 1955. Jif’s taste was sweeter than Peter Pan or Skippy, and it soared to the top of sales. It remains ahead of all other brands today.

J.M. Smucker Co. now owns the Jif brand and operates the largest peanut butter production plant in the world. The plant makes 250,000 jars of Jif peanut butter every day.

U.S. consumers spend millions of dollars annually to buy more than 65 national brands of peanut butter and hundreds of other brands manufactured regionally and from cottage industries. The money peanut butter brings in definitely isn’t peanuts.

Thanks for reading this blog. Come back here later this month to read another interesting subject. See my web site at www.joevlatino.com.