Food Fact Friday: Peanut Butter Me Up!

March is National Peanut Month. I wanted to write about my favorite form of peanuts, peanut butter! When I was a kid, I hated peanut butter for some reason. But when I went to college, I started eating tons of it. Now I eat peanut butter a few times a week. I would freak out without my weekly dose of pb&j sandwiches. Plus...I love a good peanut butter brownie or peanut butter pie! Here is some history of how peanut butter came to be...


There are many claims about the origin of peanut butter. Africans ground peanuts into stews as early as the 15th century. The Chinese have crushed peanuts into creamy sauces for centuries. Civil War soldiers dined on "peanut porridge" These uses, however, bore little resemblance to today's version of peanut butter.

In 1890, a St. Louis physician supposedly encouraged the owner of a food products company, George A. Bayle Jr., to process and package ground peanut paste as a nutritious protein substitute for people with poor teeth who couldn't chew meat. The physician apparently had experimented by grinding peanuts in his hand-cranked meat grinder. Bayle mechanized the process and began selling peanut butter out of barrels for about 6¢ per pound.

Around the same time, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg in Battle Creek, Michigan, began experimenting with peanut butter as a vegetarian source of protein for his patients. His brother, W.K. Kellogg, was business manager of their sanitarium, the Western Health Reform Institute, but soon opened Sanitas Nut Company which supplied foods like peanut butter to local grocery stores. They patented the process in 1895. But their "nut meal" was not as tasty as today's, because the peanuts were steamed instead of roasted.


Joseph Lambert, a Kellogg employee, began selling his own hand-operated peanut butter grinders in 1896. Three years later, his wife Almeeta published the first nut cookbook, "The Complete Guide to Nut Cookery".

In 1922, Joseph L. Rosefield began producing peanut butter in California. These peanut butters were churned like butter, so they were smoother than the gritty peanut butters of the day. He soon received the first patent for a shelf-stable peanut butter which would stay fresh for up to a year because the oil didn't separate from the peanut butter.

One of the first companies to adopt this new process was Swift & Company for its E.K. Pond peanut butter (renamed Peter Pan) in 1928. Rosefield eventually left the company and moved to Skippy, where he created the first crunchy style peanut butter by adding chopped peanuts into peanut butter at the end of the manufacturing process.


In 1955, Procter & Gamble entered the peanut butter business by acquiring W.T. Young Foods in Kentucky, makers of Big Top Peanut Butter. They introduced Jif in 1958 and now operate the world's largest peanut butter plant, churning out 250,000 jars every day (no salmonella there! woohoo).

We're PB Crazy! Americans eat about 3 pounds of peanut butter per person each year, totaling about 500 million pounds... enough to cover the floor of the Grand Canyon.