"Man cannot live by bread alone. He must have peanut butter," Bill Cosby
Korporate Kulture embodied as the MBA experience hustles to seize all it can as rapidly as realizable without regard to future consequences. The astute MBA successfully submits his resume to his next employer before his current employer tanks (courtesy of MBA short term gain atrocities). Thus it is that peanut butter, the staff of life saving our children from kwashiorkor since the Wright brothers, is now manufactured from carriage trade cooking oil manufacturing wastes. Wait until you read what it does to *your* bottom line.
It is a tenet of Black History that George Washington Carver invented peanut butter. Like Kemet and Kwanzaa, this is perjurious bafflegab. A St. Louis dentist in 1890 encouraged food products company owner George A. Bayle Jr. to process and package ground peanut paste as a protein substitute for people who could not chew meat. The Kelloggs patented a "Process of Preparing Nut Meal" in 1895 describing "a pasty adhesive substance that is for convenience of distinction termed nut butter." The peanuts were steamed instead of roasted prior to grinding. C.H. Sumner introduced peanut butter at the Universal Exposition of 1904 in St. Louis, selling $705.11 of it at his concession stand when money was really worth something. The Krema Products Company (still in business) commercialized it in 1908. The crunchy stuff is credited to peanut butter doyen Joseph Rosefield under the "Skippy" label.
The German 1516 Reinheitsgebot established the purity of beer as "water, barley malt, hops" and later added "yeast" when biology got its act together. Peanut butter is, in a proper world, ground roasted peanuts with perhaps a pinch salt to taste and a jot of lecithin to slow oil separation. That is all it is. Alas, peanut oil is worth much more than peanut butter. MBAs make do.
Soybean oil is worth much more than soybeans. Pressed then solvent-extracted soya meal is used as animal feed with care about toxic components: trypsin inhibitors, hemagglutinin; phytoestrogenic and goiterogenic isoflavones genistein, daidzein, glycitein, formononetin, biochanin A, and coumestrol; zinc-and iron-chelating phytic acid. A more profitable venue is diversion of soya waste into human food, such as Hamburger Helper that retails for more than the cost of hamburger, wt/wt.
Peanut waste after mechanical and perhaps solvent oil extraction is reconstituted with soybean oil (too expensive still!) and rapeseed oil (with cardiotoxic erucic acid glycerides and therefore of lessened market value) and sold as peanut butter: Skippy, Peter Pan, JIF, FMV, Ralphs, and Reese's. If you want peanut butter originating from peanuts not peanut waste, then it is a short list: Laura Scudder or Smucker's.
This is not to say that one should be enthusiastic about ingesting even peanut butter made of real peanuts. Peanuts are rich with peanut lectin. Peanut lectin conveys its own special horrors.
"Thomsen-Friedenreich blood group antigen (galactose beta-1,3-N- acetyl galatosamine alpha-) acts as oncofetal antigen in colonic epithelium with low expression in normal adult epithelia but increasing to fetal levels of expression in hyperplasia or malignancy. Peanut lectin is among the commonest dietary lectins that bind this antigen." Gastroenterology 114 44 (1998) "Peanut ingestion caused a 41% increase in rectal mucosal proliferation in individuals with macroscopically normal mucosa."
A whole lot of volunteers grabbed their ankles and dilatantly sacrificed their quality of life to warn you about yours. No bottom line is safe when MBAs are around. NO bottom line.
Mountains of peanut butter ingested as a child - aflatoxic or State-sanctioned - may be the fundamental source of hyperplastic (overgrown) and neoplastic (C-word) colonic lining dyscrasias. You know how doctors are absolutely overcome with joy given the prospect of spelunking your nether aperture with a couple of gloved fingers and then seven feet of colonoscope. A childhood of peanut butter ingestion gives them something interesting to find in your dotage.
Nothing originating with Jimmy Carter can be a good thing. It will not be pleasant thing. It will not, as the Russians say, be "kulturny."
The War on Drugs educates us that bread is a deadly "gateway" comestible inevitably leading the occasional recreational abuser to "harder" items such as butter, jelly, cold cuts, microwaved molten Chevalier-brand ripened brie cheese, and peanut butter. We will soon be seeing a thick slop of peanut butter on grilled hamburgers and in Thai restaurants. Go ahead, consume the industrially impurified maceration of Arachis hypogaea. Jars of peanuts have been discovered in Incan tombs dating to 1500 BC.
You know what happened to the Incas.