Selects: How Peanut Butter Works

Peanut butter is a strange food to love. Outside the United States, in countries like Britain and China, it is regarded much the way Americans view Vegemite—as a weird, slightly gross paste that most people would rather not eat. This fact, which the hosts stumble upon early in the episode, is genuinely jarring to them. It frames the entire conversation: peanut butter is not a universal human invention or a global staple. It is a distinctly American concoction, one that rose from poverty food and livestock feed to become a federally regulated staple with its own color standards and a 90-percent-peanut minimum.

The peanut's long, lowly road

Before there was peanut butter, there was the peanut itself—a legume, not a nut, that originated in South America. The hosts trace its history from Inca pottery and Aztec mummies to its export by Spanish and Portuguese conquistadors through the Philippines, China, and Africa. The peanut was then re-exported to the Americas as part of the West African slave trade, which is likely where the Southern word "goober" comes from (the Kongo word nguba). For centuries, peanuts were considered fit only for the poor or for livestock. They were hard to harvest, stem, and clean by hand. The Civil War changed that: Union soldiers got a taste of Southern peanuts, liked them, and soon peanuts were sold at circuses and baseball games. The "peanut galle