Peanut butter, the everyman staple, which contains neither butter nor nuts (peanuts are legumes), originated as a health food of the upper classes.
First created for sanitariums like John Harvey Kellogg’s Western Health Reform Institute, it satisfied the need for a protein-rich food that did not have to be chewed. Wealthy guests at those institutions popularized it among the well-heeled. But there were economic pressures to expand peanut-butter consumption more democratically.
Even then, peanut butter, which did not travel well, was mostly produced for regional markets. It was the development of hydrogenation in the nineteen-twenties that led directly to the industrialization of peanut-butter production, the rise of the Big Three national brands, and the arrival of peanut butter in America’s lunch boxes. By 1937—the year before the young William Buckley was shipped across the pond—it had become so common thatpublished its first peanut-butter cartoon.
Krampner gives brief histories of all three of the major brands, which each had their turn as the nation’s top spread. They illustrate the concentration and mechanization of the nation’s food supply. Peter Pan, introduced in 1928, was the first dominant national peanut butter. It used a partial-hydrogenation process patented by Joseph Rosefield, an entrepreneur from Lexington, Kentucky.
That same year, Procter & Gamble bought Big Top peanut butter from William T. Young of Kentucky and, in the ensuing years, reformulated and rebranded it to compete with Skippy and Peter Pan. P. & G. named its product Jif, used oils other than peanut oil in its hydrogenation process, and sweetened the recipe, adding sugar and molasses.
As beloved as it is, peanut butter has not been exempt from the backlash against the industrialization of food. Krampner discusses the “dark side” of peanut butter: the recent spike in peanut allergies, the deaths from salmonella contamination at processing plants, and public-health concerns over its fat content. He also devotes a chapter to Frank Ford of Arrowhead Mills, the natural-foods pioneer who started making peanut butter in 1970.
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