Jon Krampner - Creamy and Crunchy: An Informal History of Peanut Butter, the All-American Food

Creamy & Crunchy

ARTS AND TRADITIONS OF THE TABLE

PERSPECTIVES ON CULINARY HISTORY

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu

Copyright 2013 Jon Krampner

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-53093-4

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Krampner, Jon, 1952

Creamy and crunchy : an informal history of peanut butter, the all-American food / Jon Krampner.

p. cm.(Arts and traditions of the table)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-231-16232-6 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-231-53093-4 (e-book)

1. Peanut butterUnited StatesHistory. I. Title.

TX803.P35K73 2013

641.356596dc23 2012008529

Cover image: Alamy Cover design: Lisa Hamm

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at .

References to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

To the Center for Constitutional Rights,

whose dedication to truth, justice, and the American way

aint just peanuts

And to Veronica,

a friend of animals and the environment

Several workmen are opening their lunches at a construction site.

One cries out, Oh, no! Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches again. I hate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches!

Another worker says, Why dont you ask your wife to fix you something else?

You dont understand, the worker replies. I make my own lunch.

CONTENTS

B y temperament and inclination, Im a biographer. My first two books were biographies of people; this is the biography of a product.

Live-television-drama producer Fred Coe and postwar Broadway star Kim Stanley, the heroes of those first two books, were tormented geniuses who lapsed into obscurity because of drinking problems. I wanted to write about something more cheerful this time. Peanut butter may make you fat, but it wont give you cirrhosis of the liver.

Although my memory may be playing tricks with me, I remember eating only two foods as a child: peanut butter and hamburgers. When I went away to college, I stopped eating peanut butter to see what else the world held gastronomically. In the early 1980s, though, after a bad romance ended, I self-medicated with large jars of Skippy. My weight climbed to the point that it took a good nutritionist and visits to the gym to get it back under control. I gave up peanut butter again, and it wasnt until I began working on this book that I resumed eating it on a regular basis (purely for research purposes, you understand).

I thought that writing a history of peanut butter in the manner of Mark Kurlanskys Cod, John McPhees Oranges, or Steve Almonds Candyfreak would be less research intensive than biography. Boy, was I wrong.

In addition to delving into the production and history of peanut butter, I had to learn about agriculture, botany, nutrition, geology, organic chemistry, food contamination, allergies, patents and trademarks, antitrust law, the history of the American South, advertising, industrial design, statistics, and the federal rule-making process. And I still had to do biographical profiles anyway.

A few recommendations for further research: While corporations in general are reluctant to yield their secrets, Peter Pan and its various owners easily proved the most opaque, even after I hired someone I consider the Willie Mays of business researchers to help me look into it. More writing about Peter Pan, especially its early days, remains to be done. Also, historians of peanut butter have yet to settle whether St. Louis food manufacturer George Bayle, in 1894 or earlier, was making peanut butter before John Harvey Kellogg, who many regard as the founding father of peanut butter.

Although its not just for children, peanut butter is a staple of childhood, and its a comfort food. In times of economic distress and emotional uncertainty (like the present), Americans turn to it. But remarkably, given its widespread popularity, there hasnt been a book about peanut butter on the burgeoning shelf of pop food histories. Now there is.

H erb Dow got me started, and Stanley Pittman, to whom Herb introduced me, was the best possible guide to peanut country.

At Columbia University Press, Jennifer Crewe acquired the manuscript and ably edited it, while Anne McCoy was (and is) the congenial managing editor. Asya Graf and Kathryn Schell assisted Jennifer and me, and Irene Pavitt turned her eagle eye on the manuscript. Thanks also to publicist Peter Barrett and art director Julia Kushnirsky, and to John Donohue at Westchester Publishing Services.

At the various peanut industry trade organizations, thanks to Don Koehler of the Georgia Peanut Commission; Patrick Archer, Cindy Stickles, and Louise McKerchar of the American Peanut Council; Leslie Wagner of the Southern Peanut Growers; John Powell of the American Peanut Shellers Association; and Pat Kearney of the Peanut Institute.

Andrew F. Smith and Noel Riley Fitch served as my mentors. Anthony Prillaman of the National Agricultural Statistics Service fielded my endless e-mails as I tried to make sense of peanut-butter statistics.

Frank Delfino is a genuine original and living museum of Skippy peanut butter. Rick Rosefield provided several helpful interviews about the peanut butter his grandfather developed. I also received help with the Skippy story from Larry Shearon, Carl Rocky Bleier, Thomas Fuller, Bert Gannon, James Hirchak, George Mackin, and Earl Spady.

Help with the Jif story came from Paul Kiely, Neil Kreisberg, William Covington, John Gretz, David Guin, Rita Keys, Don Taylor, William T. Young Jr., Ted Woehrle, Hunter Yager, and Edward Meyer.

Background on Deaf Smith and the New Mexico peanut and peanut butter industries came from the late Frank Ford, and from Boyd Foster, George Speck, Herb Marchman, Jimmy Shearer, James Glueck, and Verla Brown.

Lavina Wilson helped me with the story of Beech-Nut peanut butter.

The honor roll of librarians includes Duncan McCluskey at the Coastal Plain Experiment Station in Tifton, Georgia; Karen Weis of the National Agricultural Library in Beltsville, Maryland; Karin Lundstrom of the Alameda Free Library; Jean E. Meeh Gosebrink of the special collections department of the St. Louis Public Library; Sheryn Morris and Judy Ostrander of the Los Angeles Public Library; Denise Shanks of the Kentucky Room at the Lexington Public Library; Chris Tonjes of the District of Columbia Public Library; Diane Wagner and Nicole LaFlamme of the Procter & Gamble Corporate Archives and Heritage Center; Edie Carmichael of the Wilson Historical Room of the Portsmouth, Virginia, Public Library; Mary Braswell at the