American Plate - Bite #64: Peanut Butter

As with a lot of Bites on the list, peanut butter is one of those foods that can be made in individual batches fairly easily, but required a tech boom to be made on a large scale. Its progression throughout history is unsurprisingly steady. In 1884, Marcellus Gilmore Edson got a patent for peanut paste, and in 1895, John Harvey Kellogg got one for the process for preparing nut butters. And of course, there's the most famous peanut booster of all, George Washington Carver, who encouraged peanut crops and peanut butter consumption as both healthy food, and as a way of making small farmers less reliant on cotton. Growing a "self-sufficiency" crop such as peanuts was an immense boon to African American farmers, and peanuts didn't fall prey to the boll weevil, which was destroying cotton crops.

Peanut butter has also been hailed for being very economical in times of poverty, so it flourished again during the Great Depression. Then it got another bump in the post-World War II era, when it became the sandwich lunch staple we all know today. You'd be hard-pressed to claim peanut butter is healthy these days, but that's mostly due to the sweeteners and extra sodium added to the ones you find on the shelves; natural peanut butter is still readily available, and is not difficult to make from scratch.

I don't bother with that, though. I'm a choosy mom, and I choose Jif. Peanut butter is, unsurprisingly, extremely popular in my household, whether it's for sweet or savory snacks. As seen above, I make buckeyes and cookies out of it, and can always heartily enjoy a traditional American PB&J for lunch as well (try it with currant jelly and thank me later). Reese's Peanut Butter Cups are the dominant candy at Halloween, and if all else fails, there's nothing wrong with just eating spoonfuls of peanut butter right out of the jar. Just writing this entry is making me want some right now.