Louis and soon thereafter Beech-Nut and Heinz introduced it nationally. Peanut butter was featured in the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis businessman who, in 1894, became the first to produce and sell it as a snack food.
While both Kellogg and Carver have been touted as “the father of peanut butter,” Krampner makes a case for George Bayle, a St. A burgeoning market for peanut butter substantially increased demand for their harvests. Once the boll weevil devastated cotton cultivation at the turn of the century, Southern farmers were encouraged by George Washington Carver and others to adopt the peanut as a replacement crop. But there were economic pressures to expand peanut-butter consumption more democratically. Wealthy guests at those institutions popularized it among the well-heeled. 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. Peanut butter, the everyman staple, which contains neither butter nor nuts (peanuts are legumes), originated as a health food of the upper classes. Artisanal and organic varieties are easier than ever to find as food entrepreneurs try to do to peanut butter what Starbucks did to coffee. The twenty-first century has also seen the increasing popularity and availability of alternatives to peanut butter’s Big Three: Jif, Skippy, and Peter Pan. Cheap and nutritious, it’s the perfect food for hard times.
Peanut-butter sales, which dipped in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, because of health concerns, have steadily risen in recent years, particularly since the start of the recession. With the assistance of corporations like ConAgra and Procter & Gamble, it was transformed into a billion-dollar business in the middle of the twentieth century. Like other all-American foods such as the hamburger, the hot dog, and the ice-cream cone, peanut butter first emerged as a retail item at the end of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, it remains, in Krampner’s phrase, an “all-American food.” Peanut butter is also increasingly found in the Saudi Arabian diet, thanks, in part, to expatriate oil workers. Canadians eat it for breakfast Haitians call it mamba and buy it, freshly pulverized, from street vendors it is popular in the Netherlands, where it is known as pindakaas, or peanut cheese. The American love of peanut butter is as mystifying to many Britons as the British love of Marmite ( yeast extract on toast?) is to me, but, as Jon Krampner writes in “ Creamy & Crunchy,” his enjoyable and informative new history of peanut butter, there are plenty of other countries that adore the crushed goober pea. “Mashed peanuts on bread?” my friends in Belfast asked, incredulously-as if peanuts were synonymous with maggots. Half a century later, when I left Washington, D.C., for school in Northern Ireland, I packed my bags with jars of Skippy. In a 1981 essay titled “In the Thrall of an Addiction,” Buckley recalled that his British schoolmates “grabbed instinctively for the grapefruit-but one after another actually spit out the peanut butter.” No wonder, he sneered, “they needed help to win the war.”
The biweekly deliveries contained a case of grapefruit and a large jar of peanut butter. Buckley, Jr., was sustained by regular care packages from his father. Shipped off to boarding school in England during the Great Depression, the twelve-year-old William F.
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