Stuff You Should Know - How Peanut Butter Works

Episode Date: May 14, 2020

No food is more all-American than peanut butter – 80 percent of homes in the country have a jar of it in the pantry right now. And while the rest of the world might find peanut butter peculiar, maybe even gross, the rest of the world is wrong. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart radios, How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to Peanut Butter Jelly Time. I'm Josh, there's Chuck. We haven't seen Jerry in a while.

If you have seen Jerry, please tell her to call home. And this is Stuff You Should Know. Yeah, Jerry, she sent out a smoke signal that said, send to me so. She did, she did. And we sent some on donkey back in that general direction. Are you a peanut butter or jelly in this scenario? I wanna be peanut buttered.

You always make me be jelly. Well, I think we should level set here at the beginning. Okay. And talk about, if you like peanut butter, which is your favorite and then what you like, how do you utilize it? Okay, my name is Josh C. And I love peanut butter.

Okay. Almost only smooth. I will eat chunky if civilization has collapsed and that's all I can find. Okay. I eat it any way, shape, or form. Sometimes just peanut butter on a spoon. Sometimes peanut butter on a spoon

with a little divot made with my tongue filled with local honey. If you wanna get tubby really fast, let me introduce you to the wonder that is a spoonful of peanut butter scooped in some cool whip. Okay. But really any kind of peanut butter

anytime I will eat it. And I've noticed that once I reached my 40s, peanut butter sticks around me a lot more than it used to. So I'm having a real struggle with it. Thank you for listening. And do you wanna buzz market your favorite brand? We use this GIF natural that's like in a brown container. And I like it so much,

I've purposely never looked at the label because I don't wanna know how natural it is. But my all time favorite is Reese's Peanut Butter. Like have you had it? You mean in the jar? Yes. Yes. Oh, it's so good.

I think I've had it once. But I was raised on GIF, now go. Well, I was raised on whatever the gigantic gallon tub is that used to get in the 80s. Yeah, I don't remember. I don't think it was any of those name brands. Now, I mean, I love peanut butter. It's one of my favorite things in the world.

And I will go crunchy or smooth, no matter. I love them both. I also like it with honey. I like it and I don't do this much obviously because it's just, I'm not 19 years old, but a peanut butter and mayonnaise sandwich is one of the best things in the world. You know, I've never had that.

Is it good, really? Dude, do you have any Cupid? Yes. Dude, peanut butter and Cupid Sammy. Okay, so half and half or more peanut butter than mayo or what? It's kind of your jam. I definitely don't go light on the mayo

because you gotta have that tang. Okay. Peanut butter and marshmallow fluff I used to eat when I was a kid. Sure, yeah, that's good stuff. Fluffer nutter and now I don't eat the sugary hydrogenated types. I either have one of the sort of artisan,

natural kinds you have to mix up or just the DeKalb Farmers Market grinds the peanuts right in front of your face into a tub and hands it to you. Right in front of your face. And it says beat it, you can't have any of this. So that's just peanuts, obviously. Yeah, it may be a little bit of salt or they add any salt or is it really just peanuts?

It's just peanuts. Wow, I wonder if they salt the peanuts when they roast them then, because I've always seen like peanuts with just a little bit of salt, like you can't have peanut butter any other way, but maybe they figured out they'd crack the code. Well, I mean, they may be salted and roasted.

I have no idea about the peanut, but it's good, it's all good. But I have to mix, you know, I gotta put a little bit of honey in there or maybe a little bit of a Gave to give it a little bit of a sweet. Oh, that's a good idea. Yeah, I was gonna ask you,

I've not had any artisan stuff and I did a little research and found a couple I wanna try. And I didn't know, like is it just straight up adult kind of stuff where you're like, oh, it's really good, but you're wishing that you had like the nasty big three brand instead? Well, I mean, if you don't add any sweetener,

it's not nearly as good as, you know, but I think the naturals are all kind of the same as far as sweetness level. Yeah, the best I could discern is that if you're paying for artisan craft peanut butter and buddy, you're paying. You're like supposedly to have, you know, depending on the kind of peanuts that are chosen,

the variety of peanuts, the way that it's roasted, almost like a coffee or a wine or something like that. There's like a sophisticated palette or terroir that you really have to pay attention to. That to me is kind of like the opposite of what peanut butter is supposed to be. It's supposed to just be like this dumb, messy thing where, you know, your hair's totally normal

and you start eating the peanut butter and you suddenly have like a cowlick and you're wearing a striped shirt that shows your gut kind of thing, you know, like you just regress in age. But I also get wanting to enjoy peanut butter in a healthy way because it is surprisingly from what I saw, it is healthier

than you would suspect if done right. Yes, not a big glob of Peter Pan with cupy mayonnaise and potato chips smashed in between white bread. Yes. Yeah. I'm hungry now. I am too, I already had some peanut butter this morning.

So I'm good to go, but this thing, this was like the yawning episode where I kept yawning doing research. This is, I just wanted peanut butter the whole time. Well, peanut butter for me has now become my, in my, since January, you know, I'm trying to lose some weight. So that's become my sweet treat at the end of the night instead of going and getting ice cream.

Oh, good for you. Just like a spoonful of peanut butter and honey and that'll satiate that desire. I haven't seen you in a while, how's it going? That's good. I mean, I'm down 20 since January, but it's really leveled off the past month. Congratulations, dude.

That is really impressive. Just 40 more to go. Man, no, that's really great, man. Just, yeah, it does plateau, but it picks up again. Don't worry. It plateaus because of quarantine alcoholism. Oh, well, I was going to ask because I'm finding that quarantining has made things,

like we, you know, we have food and everything, but we're eating it less for some reason rather than the opposite, which both you, me and I were really concerned was going to be the way it went. Are you finding it easier to keep up with food or harder? Easier because I'm cooking a lot, cheese and buzz marketing again, but you know, I'm just having one of those

Mike's Mighty Goods for lunch, which is very low in calories. Yeah, it's really good too. And I, you know, I'm just tracking the calories and it's alcohol, that's the problem right now. I got you. Yeah, I've been doing one or two nights a week tops and then a couple of nights.

I've been pretty good now that I think about it. It's good. Yeah, cause this has been fairly stressful, but I haven't been stress eating too much. So, okay. Anyway, peanut butter, here to me, Chuck, early on, we happen upon the fact of the podcast, if you ask me. This was a very jarring, if you'll forgive the pun,

that peanut butter outside of the United States in a lot of different countries is looked upon as very weird and gross in much the same way that we Americans tend to think of like, Vegemite, people like the British, Chinese, other countries do not think peanut butter is particularly good. They think it's a little nasty.

And that just blew me away to read that. Yeah, I'd want to talk to some people before I'd let some internet website tell me that people think peanut butter is gross. Some website push your brain around? Yeah, I'd like to talk to some folks about that. But at the very least, even if they don't think it's gross, it is an all-American thing.

Like even countries that do enjoy it, I've read that Australia actually likes it a lot. It's an American concoction. So much so that like, it might be the most American concoction there is to tell you the truth. Yeah, I mean, you make a good point here. You put this stuff together,

that mac and cheese came from Europe, hot dogs came from Europe, sort of hamburgers, even though I would argue that the hamburgers, we know it is pretty American. Sure. But peanut butter, just us as far as modern times go. Yeah, I think that the Inca in the 15th century used to grind peanuts into a paste,

and then that was it until the 19th century when one of our buddies who's gonna make a cameo later got his hands on the idea. But yeah, it was an American invention, except it was actually Canadian as we'll see. But for the most part, people think of it as all-American. And to talk about peanut butter, Chuck,

we kind of have to talk about peanuts. There's really no way around it. Believe me, I don't want to, but we have to. I think you mean goobers. Have you ever heard somebody outside of TV call them that? Not really, but I knew it was a thing, but it's not in the just daily nomenclature of my crowd. But it's supposedly like a Southern,

and I guess an antiquated Southern word for peanut, a goober or a goober pea. Yeah, I've heard goober in that old song about the raisinettes, goober. Well, goober's is also a candy, right? Yeah, and there's Smucker's goober's, which is peanut butter and jelly mixed together in a jar. It's actually good.

Is it? Yeah, even as a kid, I was like, this is gonna be gross. And then I tried it. I was like, not bad, not bad Smucker's. See, I'm pretty discerning with my jams and jellies. So that's for another day though. You would not like this.

I probably wouldn't. You wouldn't like Smucker's. And if you're at all discerning, you would not like it. All right, so peanuts is a, it's a legume. It's also called a ground nut or an earth nut. And just like a lintel or a pea, it is a little legume. It's not a nut. No, I'm a big fan of peanuts though.

I like to eat them pretty much anyway. You can slice it from boiled to straight up raw out of the shell, like I'm honey roasted, salted and roasted and certainly in peanut butter. So Momo and I go and visit squirrels whenever we can when we go on walks and we always take peanuts. And I read you're supposed to take roasted unsalted peanuts. So we get like big bags of those.

And if there's no squirrels out, I get to eat all the peanuts. Oh yeah? Yeah, Momo will give me a look like, those are not for you, but they usually end up in my tummy anyway. You ever seen a squirrel stick one of those in his mouth sideways?

Yep. I have. It's pretty darn cute. Yeah, we will like all shell them and then throw like the actual peanut in the squirrel. Somehow we'll know that there's supposed to be another one coming and they'll very frequently put one in his cheek

and then like be like, okay, toss me the other one. Then I'll take that and run off and like eat it with those two little hands. It's really adorable. Right, or they might stick around to see if it's one of the rare three bangers. Right, which is just, that's a good squirrel day right there.

All right, so these things are legumes and we think they originated in South America. You mentioned Peru, even though we cannot prove that through the fossil record, but they have found evidence in the archeological culture from Peru from about 7,600 years ago. And it was sort of one of these things

where they found the fact that they were farming this stuff. And then when you see it in like artwork and pottery and stuff like that, then you know, it's sort of a thing. Yeah, right. The peanut has arrived when it shows up on pottery, you know? For real. They've also found them, I guess,

entombed with mummies from the Inca and the Aztecs, which makes sense because when the conquistadors arrived, the Spanish and the Portuguese to South America and Central America, they found peanuts being grown as far north as Mexico. But I think the first place they encountered them was actually in the Caribbean. And they took them back with them.

They took them to Spain and Spain passed them along to the rest of Europe and the Philippines and China. The Portuguese took it back again to Europe, but also to India and Africa. And peanuts started to be farmed all over the world. Like the world loves peanuts. It's just not necessarily peanut butter that they're crazy about.

And then in a really kind of weird, surprising twist, the peanuts were re-exported back to the Americas from Africa as part of the West African slave trade. And actually that word goober, that Southern word goober, they think comes from a Congolese word or Congo with a K word in Gooba. Yeah. Pretty surprising.

Sure, goober in Gooba, close enough. Yeah, but to think like the peanut, you think of the peanut as just American as it comes. And then even as Georgia as it comes, but the idea that it wouldn't have been here had it not been for the importation of African slaves that reintroduced the peanut to the Americas. That's a pretty circuitous and weird route for it to take.

Yeah, and Africa still grows about 25% of the peanuts in the world. We're just below that at about 21% here in the States. And it took all the way to 1842 that we started growing them commercially in the US in Virginia is where it first started for oil and food and to substitute out for cocoa. And it just wasn't like,

it was kind of like for people that didn't have the means to buy something better or maybe feed it to your animals or something like that. Yeah, it was good for livestock. And the poverty stricken basically was who were expected to eat peanuts at the time. That's right. It's just like Lobster,

have you ever read Consider the Lobster that, oh man, I wanna say David Lee Roth so bad but I know it's not his name at all. Who wrote Consider the Lobster? I've never heard of that, but I know about the Lobster. Who was End of Tour about that movie? Oh, David Foster Wallace. Oh, sure, sure, yeah.

He wrote this really great magazine article once called Consider the Lobster, it's good. But in it, he explains that it used to be considered a food fit only for the poor, basically. I guess peanuts were considered the same. That's right. You know, there were sea spiders. Yeah, or the cockroaches of the sea.

Disgusting. It is kind of gross when you think of it like that. And apparently there was a law that said that you could only feed so much lobster to patients in mental asylums at the time or else it became abusive. Oh, wow. They didn't know, did they try them

on a hot dog bun with mayonnaise? So one of the reasons why the peanut was viewed as such a lowly crop was that it was, again, it was used for oil and which, I mean, this wasn't necessarily just cooking oil, they would use it to lubricate machinery, that kind of stuff. So the idea of eating the same thing

that your machinery lube came from was probably not super appetizing. But it was also like you would get just basically trash when you got a bag of peanuts because there was no easy way to harvest it, stem them, clean them and prepare them for basically general consumption. So again, you could just dump it into a trough

and feed it to your livestock or you could spend a lot of time trying to separate it or you could just be like, I'm not messing with this. And for a long time they didn't mess with it, actually. Yeah, when the Civil War happened, the Union soldiers got their hands on some of our Southern peanuts and they said these are delicious

and both armies ate a lot of peanuts. And then when the circus rolled around with P.T. Barnum, Hugh Jackman, they started selling peanuts there, hot roasted peanuts. And especially in the cheap seats, they become known as the peanut gallery. And that's where that phrase came from, which is kind of interesting.

Yeah, because apparently if they didn't like what they saw, they would toss their peanuts that they were eating at the stage. So that's where peanut gallery came from. Yeah, and then you've got them on the street corners. You've got them at baseball games. Peanuts are starting to get a little traction as a snack, but they were still not,

it was still hard to get like a really good quality peanuts because like you said, the way they were being harvested at the time by hand, it was just tough to do. And then so two African Americans around the turn of the last century stepped up and basically said, we're gonna make the peanut what it is today. So one obviously was George Washington Carver,

who's known as basically the father of the peanut, who actually contrary to popular belief did not invent peanut butter, but he did come up with more than 300 different ways to use the peanut. And I never realized like why he was so bonkers for peanuts. But one of the reasons he was trying to make the peanut or establish it as a prominent crop

was because the South had depleted its soil so badly from growing cotton for so long. And then at the worst of this, there was a bullweevil outbreak that just ruined the rest of the cotton crop. So the South really needed something to replace cotton and George Washington Carver helped introduce and popularize peanuts and say,

not only can you eat these things, look at all this other stuff you can make out of them. That's right. And there was another guy around the same time named Ben Hicks, Mr. Benjamin Hicks. He was from Virginia and which we already talked about being a big peanut state. And he invented a gas powered machine for cleaning and stemming these things.

He got it patented like a lot of, well it still goes on I guess with the little guy and their patents, big farm came around and a farm equipment company challenged him. He actually had to go to court, but won the case in 1901. And this picker was a big, big deal in modernizing peanut farming.

And all of a sudden you could get really good peanuts a lot quicker, doesn't take as many hands or man hours or person hours. And the demand for peanuts for oil, for eating them and peanut butter and candy all just kind of went through the roof at that point. Yeah, yeah. Because you could get your hands on good peanuts,

they were widely available and they were just delicious. Everyone saw finally how great peanuts are, but not peanut butter yet. And I propose Charles that we take a break and then come back and really dig into the peanut butter. Let's do it. Okay. Letting things with jock and jock,

shining on the face that you should know. On the podcast, pay dude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back

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Stop pushing now. Okay, so like I said, the Inca probably had us beat as far as the invention of peanut butter went. Um, but it was actually a Canadian who they think was probably the actual inventor of modern peanut butter. A guy who I had never heard of before. His name was Marcellus Gilmore Edson Wallace.

I'm kidding about the last part. It was just Marcellus Gilmore Edson. You just can't say the name Marcellus and not follow it up with Wallace somewhere, you know? It really has become like peanut butter and jelly. Yeah, very nice. So he patented a paste made of peanuts in 1884, which was described by him and his patent as,

at room temperature, having a consistency like that of butter, lard, or ointment, which it sounds gross, but when you think about peanut butter, that's kind of about right. Yeah. He added sugar to stabilize it a little bit. And this was kind of like the first modern peanut butter

that we think of as peanut butter. It's sold for about six cents a pound, which is a pretty good price. Yeah, and if you, from what I can tell, just reading about it, if you tried it today, you'd be like, yeah, that's peanut butter. Whereas if you tried some of the other stuff, you'd be like, oh yeah, that's the artisan peanut butter.

It's punishing. Yeah. And the other stuff was first developed. So it's interesting to me that there's, in the first try right out of the gate, the guy who invents peanut butter basically invents the modern version of it. And then it takes a big step backwards or sideways,

I guess you can say, depending on your viewpoint, when our buddy, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg comes along. And if you'll remember from the live show we did on the Kellogg brothers, he invented nut butters. And in particular, peanut butter. He's considered one of the main inventors of peanut butter. Well, yeah, it was right up his alley because I think that might be

my favorite live show we've done actually. Oh yeah? I think so. PR was my favorite. PR, I knew you were gonna say that. You did. Yeah, that was a good one. You did.

I think those are my top two. What about Pentos, man? What about D.B. Cooper? Those might be the first four that I would name. What else have we done? Malls, bars. We did the secret one that is still supposedly on tour, but on hiatus right now.

I think that's it. I think that's all. Well, I'm gonna go with John Harvey Kellogg because he, if you listen to that one, he was very big on chewing food until it was the consistency of peanut butter basically. And so peanut butter comes along and he's like, well, this is perfect

because you don't have to chew it like that. It's already like that. It'll just glide right through your system and come out as delicious peanut butter poop. Yeah, and it won't poison your entire body and you won't have to spend any time in the electric light bath. That's right.

It's a kneading machine. So Dr. Kellogg creates basically what we would recognize today as the artisan version of peanut butter. It's just ground up peanuts that form a paste. And apparently that's just a natural thing that happens. Like if you put roasted peanuts in a food processor, it's gonna turn like gritty and everything. But if you just keep going,

it eventually reaches this point, this threshold where that grit turns into this oily paste like peanut butter, like an ointment like Marcellus Wallace would call it. And that's basically what John Harvey Kellogg did and served at Battle Creek. But most of the people who would have been exposed to peanut butter would not have tried John Kellogg's

because that sanitarium was really expensive. And it was for the wealthy, it was for celebrities. So most people experience peanut butter at one or two places. And Chuck, I really found out in researching this that the history of peanut butter is super murky. It's like a smooth full of peanut butter stirred up in a glass of water kind of murky, right?

Correct. Where it is kind of correct. Where it's just not entirely clear who did what, when, whose contribution has been disproportionately mythologized. But from what I can tell, John Harvey Kellogg is definitely one of the fathers of peanut butter. Mr. Marcellus was one as well.

And then it gets a little murkier after that. It's so much so that people say, well, peanut butter made its debut at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair. And then other people are like, no, no, that's way wrong. It made its debut at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. And I can find good credible sources that say either one. So I have no idea where it made its debut.

I believe it was sold for sure at the St. Louis World's Fair in 1904. And that a guy named C.H. Summers sold like $20,000 worth of peanut butter as snack items there. But that the people who ate it there had probably already been exposed to peanut butter and liked it.

They might not have been something that was part of like their everyday thing. They weren't standing in their pantry eating it off of a spoon. But they had probably had it before. And this was like a real treat for them to experience it. It wasn't like debuted in 1904 from what I can tell. Right.

Well, regardless of who introduced it initially, by 1907, thanks to companies like Heinz and Beechnut, they were selling 34 million pounds of peanut butter up from just 2 million in 1899. So over an eight year period. That's a pretty big increase. And the soldiers come into play again. It wasn't just the Civil War and World Wars one and two.

And I've had peanut butter K rations before. Really? Uh-huh. My dad used to get that stuff a lot when I was a kid for camping and stuff at the Army Navy store. So it became a big part of your Army rations in the armed forces because it had a lot of protein.

It was good sustenance. You can make a PB and J and that was pretty comforting. If you were on the front lines or in a trench in World War one. Yeah. Supposedly they popularized the PB and J the troops did. That's right. And thank them for that.

Oh, I will. I'll salute the troops for that one. But it was pretty regional at the time in the early 20th century. It didn't travel that great. They finally let, you know, I mentioned hydrogenized earlier. It was this hydrogenation.

Is that right? Yeah. That really led to the big three coming about with the industrialization of peanut butter production and three gentlemen named Peter Pan, Skippy, and Jif, which I was curious about Jif, where that came from. And all I found was they said it's easy to spell,

easy to say, and easy to remember. It's true. All three of those. Check, check, and check. And had no meaning beyond that, basically. Really, I would have guessed it had something to do with, you know, like doing it in a Jif or Jifi or something, huh? No, I mean, you got to be in the room, I guess,

to know where the seed came from, but they just said it was simple and super easy. And that was kind of the end of that story. Good night. How about it more? No, I'm with you. I do too. I'm kind of mad right now,

but we got to press on with hydrogenation, right? Because there's this guy named John Krampner, and he wrote a book called The Creamy and Crunchy all about peanut butter. And he basically points that as saying like that, that was the turning point for peanut butter. Maybe even tied for first with its invention was the introduction of hydrogenation,

which takes oils that are liquid at room temperature. And as hydrogen and a catalyst, usually like powdered nickel, and those bonds become infused or saturated with hydrogen. And so they stick together a lot more easily. So those liquid oils have a more stable, solid state at room temperature. So you go from like peanut butter with oil on top

to peanut butter that doesn't have oil on top, but the oils mixed into the mixture, and it stays that way even on the store shelf, which people love because, I mean, you know, from eating artisan peanut butter, it's kind of a pain to stir it up, little darling. I mean, that initial stir is a little dodgy because it's so close to the lid.

Yeah. But you just have to have the right spoon, take your time, don't be in a rush. All right. And you know, shelf life stability is super important with peanut butter because only monsters put their peanut butter in the refrigerator.

Who does that? Who? Point them out to me. Monsters. Like you've met somebody who's done that before? No, I think it was in a Judge John Hodgman listener mail at one point. Oh, man.

I don't think it was a major case, but I think it was one of their listener mail ones. Okay. But totally think it should be on the shelf. That's where it belongs. Right. Although I will say, if you mix a little PB&J with the natural kind and you put it in the fridge

because you've had your two bites and you made too much, the next day, it is interesting. It's more like a Reese's Cup consistency. It's kind of hard and makes for a nice little snack, but it's certainly not anything that you can spread on bread. Right, right. Well, that's the other thing too, is if the oils are mixed into the solids,

that forms this creamier substance that makes it way easier to spread, which moms love, right? Sure. And then the other thing it does too, is with all of those hydrogen atoms linked on to the fat chains, the lipids, there's not all these unused or open bonds that an oxygen atom can come along and bond to

and oxidize the peanut butter, which creates peroxide, which gives it a rancid taste. So, hydrogenation not only made peanut butter less liquidy, more creamy, it also made it last longer, like sitting on the shelf before it was sold and used. It wouldn't turn rancid nearly as fast. So it was a big deal. The problem is, is that took peanut butter,

which is actually kind of healthy with a mono unsaturated fat, that liquid oil, and turned it into saturated, or partially saturated fat, which is really tough on the old ticker. Yeah, that's why, I'd stay away from that stuff. I mean, it's so good. But yeah, I made the switch many years ago. Good for you, Jack.

Yeah, the hydrogenated, outsold natural for the first time in 42, and accounts for about 80% of the current market. Peter Pan, believe it or not, I don't think I've ever had Peter Pan. It's not bad. Unless it was just at a friend's house or something. I don't think we ever had it in our house.

Peter Pan makes a natural one too, and I'm making air quotes, like GIF does. And it's- I think they all do know. It might even be better than GIF's natural version. I think Emily likes the Smucker's natural. But I also got some, I can't remember the brand, it's one of the other natural brands.

They're all pretty good, I think. Okay. So, 1928 was when Peter Pan rolled out, and was the first, which I didn't know, was the first major brand. It was the biggest seller at the time. It used that partial hydrogenation process that was patented by a guy named Joseph Rosefield

from Kentucky. And then that's where GIF, or et cetera, a skip he came from. Peter Pan's parent company said, I wanna cut your licensing fee. He said, I'm done with you, and I'm gonna go out, and I'm gonna make Skippy on my own. And by the end of his career, he had 10 patents,

not just for peanut butter, but relating to food. And he was just kind of like Chevy Chase in vacation movies. He was a food scientist. Yeah, well, was it the thing that he learned to coat a flake with that he used on the sled? Oh, I don't know, some sort of silicon or something. A non-nutritional, oh, I can't remember.

I'll figure it out. No need to email everyone, no need to email. No, I wanna hear, I want every email about this. I think it was called a non-nutritional coating, is what he called it. But yes, he was very much like that, but he was also way, way, way better than anything Chevy Chase could ever be,

because he was a really great boss. He paid his workers really well. And in creating the Skippy brand, he broke off from this kind of, this corporate overlord that he worked for, was keeping him under his thumb and then trying to short change him and said, you know what, by creating Skippy,

I'm going to not only challenge you, Peter Pan, I'm gonna become the best-selling peanut butter there is from like 1950 to 1980. Like Skippy was it, and I just missed the Skippy train. So I'm wondering like if I had been born in 1970, if I would have been raised on Skippy, but I came along at the Jif era, really. Yeah, he said, in your face.

And they said, I love peanut butter in my face. And he went, oh, I got to think of a new comeback. You know, Chuck, one thing that's always bothered me about Peter Pan, is do you remember that jingle where it's like, eat some peanut butter anytime you can? It's like, oh, that's nice. And then they follow it up with, but only if it's Peter Pan.

Like it's got kind of this like, if I can't have you, no one can, psychotic mentality to it. Yeah, I never heard that song. So I never really thought about that. You didn't watch the television in the 1990s? I did, I don't remember that one though. But I mean, I was in the 90s, I was in college, so I probably wasn't, I don't even think we had cable.

Why did much TV in college? Gotcha. So Skippy is doing great. Peter Pan is just like, well, I guess I'll just have to be second banana. And Skippy and Jif said, how do you like being third banana? Because that's where you're headed. That same year in 1955,

this is when Rosefield sold Skippy to Best Foods, Procter & Gamble, bought Big Top Peanut from William T. Young, also of Kentucky. Yeah. And then they became Jif, and they held that brand until 2001, 2002. Yeah, I did not know that. That's right.

But wait, 2001, 2002. It's when they sold the Smuckers. Oh, okay, but Jif is still the number one brand today, right? As far as I know. Okay, yeah, that's my understanding too. I thought you were saying like it was the number one brand until then. But yeah, from I think 1980 to today, it's number one.

Yeah, and they got a lot of, I think they all do, but Jif alone has 15 different kinds of peanut butter, which is kind of nuts. If you look at their list, they've got all kinds of different crazy peanut butters out there now. Nuts is just one variety.

Well, they all have peanuts in it, but yeah. Well, they have a good almond butter too. Yeah, I can get down with some almond butter. You know what, buddy? I'm gonna buy you some. When we see each other again, I'm gonna be brandishing a jar of Jif almond butter for you. You know, it's not good.

What? Is, you know, you can't take peanut butter sandwiches into classrooms anymore, or at least at my kid's preschool. And of course you can't take anything in there anymore because it's closed. But you have to make it with, what a cheese, I used to chew these things all the time.

What do baseball players chew? Sunflower seeds? Chickpeas. Sunflower butter. That's good too, I've had that. It's not bad. Oh, I do not care for it. Oh, you don't like it, huh?

I think it's all right. I guess I'm, wow, I really like basically any kind of butters, including just butter butter. Well, yeah, butter's great, but I just cannot get down with the sunflower butter. Is it sunflower? Yeah, sunflower. Yeah, no, it totally is.

And it's definitely, there's a taste of sunflower to it. Like you could have no idea what you were eating and somebody gives it to you and you would be like, that's sunflower butter, isn't it? I love sunflower seeds though. That was a big thing in college for a little while. We would sit around and, you know, just put a mouthful of sunflower seeds in our mouth.

Oh yeah, I remember the sunflower trend quite well. Remember that and you would crack, yeah, you would crack them open with your teeth and you would spit out the shell and then swallow the seed, chew on the seed and swallow it. So I would eat the whole thing. You, no, you didn't eat the shell. Yeah, this is, I would eat the whole thing

and then I would smoke a whole cigar and inhale it. You were a very bad squirrel and then you would drown your lawn in water and you would sit back and say, I'm doing life just right. Yeah, I got it all figured out. Would you really eat the shells? I still do to this day. Really?

Yeah, and it's kind of dangerous because every once in a while there's like one part to it that's just a spear and it can go right into your gums if you're not careful. So I'm pretty good at it, but every once in a while I'll be like, I think I'm bleeding. Well, here's how I eat peanuts.

When I go to the ball game, I stick the whole peanut in my mouth. Really? Uh-huh, like a squirrel. And I kind of suck on it for a second and get that salty goodness. And then I crack it open with my teeth and I pull it out of my mouth

and then dump the peanuts in and throw away the shells. And then between every bite, you have to coat your lips with lip balm because it's so dried and cracked by the salt. Maybe, it is pretty salty. But the only time I eat peanuts in the shell like that is at a baseball game. So now I do something similar,

but it's with peanut M&Ms. I will like crack the peanut M&M in half and expose the peanut. With your teeth? Yes, and then eat that, the freed chocolate shell side. And then eat the other chocolate shell side from around the peanut. And then I eat the peanut by itself.

Are you kidding or are you serious? I'm dead serious. I can't remember the last time I ate a peanut M&M without doing that with every single one. All right, here's what I'll do sometimes with peanut M&Ms. Okay. We should just have a side gig where we just talk about our stupid quirks.

We do, it's part of the podcast. I put, and sometimes I'll just mow on them like there's no tomorrow, but sometimes I will, and this helps me eat fewer of them because I will pop one or two in my mouth and I'll just let them sit there and marinate in my saliva and swirl them around.

And then that candy coating kind of melts away a little bit and makes it like a really soft little crunch. Yep, I know what you mean. You know that move? Yep, it's really good. I do that too, but usually I'm a little less patient than that. Maybe once in a while.

Maybe when I'm like, you know, I have a whole Tupperware bowl full of peanut M&Ms. I might go crazy like that. All right, so let's, should we take a break or should we wait a second? Yeah, let's do that. Let's take a break. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called

David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends

to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal?

No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy,

blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to

when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help.

This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me.

Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody

about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, so where we left off was Jif was killing it. You and I have very weird eating habits. Yeah.

And Jif starts killing it. They start putting sugar and molasses in there. Everyone else followed suit. And finally in the 1960s, the FDA stood up and said, hold on a minute, guys. This stuff you're calling peanut butter is junk food now. There's one leading brand. I'm not going to name names.

I think it was Jif. That was only 75% actual peanuts. He's like, so you got to start putting 95% peanuts in the whole thing. The peanut butter lobby said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. How about 87%? And they said, we're the FDA, we meet people in the middle. Let's settle on 90% peanuts and peanut butter.

And since 1971, that's been the standard. Yeah, I think this went on for a dozen years. There's a really interesting article on today I found out called the Momentus Peanut Butter Hearings. It's definitely worth reading. But it just was nuts. Literally nuts how long this went on for. And then finally, it's just kind of heartening

that the FDA was like, no, 90%. That's as low as we're going. Make sure that your peanut butter has 90% peanuts. Good day to you, sir. And that was that, finally. And it became enforced in 1972. And still today, there is a federal legal definition for what constitutes peanut butter.

And one of the first things is, it has to have 90% peanuts in it. That's right, because that is still the standard. If it is smooth, it has to be very fine with an even texture and no hint of grainy peanuts at all. If it's medium, you can have a little grain to it, but nothing larger than 1 1⁄ 16th of an inch and dimension, and then all bets are off

if you're crunchy. I don't know. Who says chunky, but it's definitely crunchy in my house. Yeah, that's like a type of gamble soup. So crunchy can be larger than one 1⁄ 16th. And I guess, I mean, they're all about the same size. be curious to see if there are any kind of half-sized peanuts if it gets that chunky. Oh yeah, like larger than a 16th of an inch? Yeah, like a half of a

peanut. Yeah, people would be like, it's too chunky, I can't take it. Maybe, I mean that's that's like candy bar level. It is. It is. So Chuck, what you've just said is the federal government's definition of the different varieties of peanut butter as far as they're concerned. And I don't know if you said it or not, but that guy Joseph Rosefield, who was the founder of Skippy, he actually created crunchy peanut butter. We both said crunchy and now we're both saying chunky. I know, it's kind of stuck in my head, but he's the guy who, if you like chunky peanut butter, first of all, shame on you. But secondly, thank Joseph

Rosefield for that, because he came up with it, I think in the 50s. Yeah, like I said, I like it all. There is not a kind of peanut butter that I won't eat. I think it's all really good. So then I think also this kind of demonstrates just how seriously Americans take peanut butter. The USDA goes on to say there are other qualities that make a peanut butter either grade A, grade B, or substandard peanut butter. It's my favorite. It's things like color. The color has to match certain color samples that you can only obtain from a company called Agtron Inc. of Sparks, Nevada. This is in the 1972 law

that you have to write to Agtron and say, can you please send me the peanut butter color standards, because I need to make sure that my peanut butter matches the USDA standards for color of peanut butter. They said, dude, they're online. Get with it. Why are you writing me a letter? Right. That's a really good point. You email or you write back like I don't know, but can you please send me the website URL? Then they would. But when you get this color standard, you can't just look at it wherever. You have to look at it at a light with a color temperature of about 7,500 Kelvin plus or minus 250 Kelvin, or something

equal to a moderately, partly cloudy day. That's the government's standard for judging the color of peanut butter. All I can think of now is somebody writing a handwritten letter to someone asking for a URL. It's someone with a ballpoint pen spelling out HTTPS colon slash slash. I looked up Agtron Inc. They're still around and they are on point, man. They've been in business for I think about a century, but they are all about like food analysis. If you're a coffee roaster or a barista or something, you can take their online class. I think it's online. It's like a day-long class that really teaches

you all the science behind the coffee you're selling and roasting and grinding. It's a really interesting company, it looks like. But if you start making peanut butter, you need to write a letter to Agtron Inc. asking for their URL. They will send you a laminated sheet and a manila envelope. So if you're talking peanut butter in the United States, about half of the edible use of peanuts is from peanut butter. Obviously peanut butter is in a ton of... it's one of my favorite parts of candy bars and stuff like that. I'm a sucker for any peanut butter ice creams, peanut butter candy bars. It's

just... I can't get enough of that combination. I'm totally with you buddy. Which by the way, Joseph Rosefield was... the Skippy guy was the guy who came up with that peanut butter and chocolate combo before Reese's did. But the National Peanut Board estimates that it takes about 540 peanuts to make up one of those 12 ounce jars, which is a lot of peanuts. That kind of surprised me. It was more than I thought. Yeah, sit there and shell peanuts until you reach 540 individual peanuts and you will have a sudden appreciation for your peanut butter. You know what I mean? For sure. But of course, machines do that. But yeah.

Well, if it's artisan, no. Somebody wearing like a calico sarong is doing it with by hand in Vermont. I love it. That's what I think Vermont people are like. Yeah. I think that's my conception. Prove me wrong, Vermont. So in 2009, we're talking about health aspects. There's a couple of parts to the health of it of whether or not it's just good for you, which we'll get to. But also, there have been a couple of peanut butter incidents throughout the years, in recent years, that have scared people off from peanut butter a little bit. Yeah. In 2009 was the second one. There were 500 people who got sick and eight people died from eating peanut

butter from a plant in Blakely, Georgia that was pretty gross and not maintained well. I remember that, don't you? I remember both of them. The other one was in 2007 and that was Salmonella and Peter Pan and Great Value, both owned by Con Agra and that got about 600 and changed sick, but nobody died. Luckily. But I remember both of those. It was a big deal because peanut butter is so ubiquitous. So there's also, I didn't realize this until I started researching it. There's something called aflatoxins. Have you heard of them? I think I did back when all this stuff happened or maybe not, but I have heard of it. So there's a

mold called aspergillus that grows on peanuts because peanuts are grown underground. The aspergillus can produce a toxin called aflatoxins and apparently humans are pretty much immune to its initial effects or its short term effects, but we have no idea what happens if you eat aflatoxins over the course of a lifetime. What happens? Apparently, there's studies of humans that found that it's been linked to certain types of cancer, potentially birth defects, cognitive disabilities, all sorts of horrible stuff. Peanut butter producers say, well, we get at least 89% of the

aflatoxins out just by processing peanuts and you say, well, what about the other 11% and they're like, have some Peter Pan and forget your troubles. That's right. So there is a real risk of something bad happening to you, whether it's a poisoning or not, but a lot of people are like, even if it's pure peanut butter, it's still not healthy for you. Yeah, I mean, the major brands that are sugary and hydrogenated certainly aren't good for you. If you're going to the farmer's market and getting those peanuts ground right in front of your face, it's not terrible. It's got a

lot of nutrition. It's got a lot of antioxidants. We're talking, this is 100 grams of this stuff. You've got 45% RDA of vitamin E, 67% of vitamin B3, 67%, I'm sorry, 73% of manganese and 39% of magnesium. So it's got a lot of good stuff in there. It's got a lot of calories too. That's about 600 calories, creating 100 grams worth. But if it's, you know, I mean, that's 100 grams is a lot. No, it is a tremendous amount. The other thing is too, is if you're eating that artisan peanut butter, that craft peanut butter, the non-hydrogenated, I guess I should say, peanut butter, the oils and the fats in

it are actually good for you. The monounsaturated fat is the kind that's good for your heart. It's that saturated stuff that becomes shelf-stable. That's the stuff that can build up as plaque in your arterial walls and cause, you know, heart attacks and strokes and that kind of thing. But the natural peanut butter actually does the opposite. It helps your cholesterol levels. That's right. It's great. It's basically just really calorie dense. Like if you're trying to lose weight, it's a good idea to shy away from peanut butter. But if you're eating natural peanut butter, it's not like a non-nutricious food. It's actually

pretty nutritious. It's just calorie dense. Right. And if you're trying to lose weight and you opt for a spoonful of peanut butter and honey rather than a pint of Ben and Jerry's, then you're definitely doing the right thing. For sure, man. For sure. One thing though that has, you know, strikes fear in a lot of people, like you were saying in your daughter's preschool, you can't even bring a peanut butter sandwich in there anymore. Is this the rise of the peanut allergy? Like there's a survey that was conducted in the 80s, the 90s, and the 2000s. I think the most recent one was in 2008. And they found that between 1997 and 2008, in

this national survey of 5,300 homes, that the self-reported peanut allergies went from 0.4% of respondents to 1.4% of respondents, which it's 1.4% doesn't sound like a lot, but that's a huge increase between like 11 years, I guess. But the thing is, is if you look at other studies, they found that, yes, self- reported rates are on the rise, but doctor diagnosed rates have held steady. So there seems to be an increase in perception that people have peanut allergies that's not necessarily an increase in actual peanut allergies, which is really strange and bizarre to think of, if that's correct. Yeah, and I

have seen the trend of oral immunotherapy, like feeding your very small child and your baby peanuts to a little bit at a time to ensure, or hopefully ensure, that they won't be stricken with the worst food allergy of all. It's true. The peanut allergy. And there was a study in Israel that had guidelines for early infant feeding, and they said around 46 months of age, just shove a bunch of peanuts in their mouth and see what happens. And make them chew, and then hit them with the lip balm. Yeah, hit them with the lip balm. So one last thing, Chuck, and I couldn't find a place to put it, but it has to be said.

There is a phobia called arachabutoraphobia. Yeah, I think I nailed it that last time. Okay. And it is. Is that for me? Is that my cue? Yes. It's hard to tell because you're not kicking me under the table. I'm not doing that series of blinks. That is the fear of peanut butter getting stuck on the roof of your mouth. That is a true thing. Which shouldn't be a fear because all you got to do is just keep working the tongue, and that peanut butter is going to dislodge and go right down your throat. That's right. Just like John Harvey Kellogg foresaw. Get a little whole milk, and you're all set. Nice, man. Or some cool whip. Don't forget the

cool whip. I got to try that. I don't know if you should try that. I think I gained 10 pounds in a month just after I discovered that. It's not good for you, man. Yeah, cool whip doesn't last long on a house. We can't keep it here. It's just like, it's really hard not to just sort of, oh, I'll just have a little spoonful every now and then. Right. Where did it go? Yeah, it's like your hair is stuck to your forehead because you've put your whole face in the tub. It's so good, and it's good frozen, too. I don't know if you ever tried that. Yeah, I've tried it both ways, but if you do want to try it, it's about half and

half peanut butter cool whip per spoonful. I'll give it a shot if I'm ever allowed to go to the grocery store again. Yeah, right. Okay, well, I think that's it then for peanut butter unless you have anything else. We got nothing else. Okay, well, since we said we have nothing else, it means it's time for lotion or hair. I'm going to call this early listener that came back as an adult. Love these. Hey, guys, last year I, well, what I really love is people that never stop listening. Right. But we'll take this. Hey, guys, last year I started getting back into stuff you should know after a long break from the nine to 10 days. What

does that mean? And a need for an educational podcast on my long drives to Blacksburg, Virginia, from the Tidewater area of Virginia. I think they got hit by the Aphelotoxin. I think he maybe, I don't know what he means. When I first started listening, I was in middle school and I always loved Trivia and your podcast helped me annoy other students with random facts about Twinkies and Fluoride. Once I went through church camp, it was appreciated. I earned the name Random Fact Kid. You guys helped me encourage my natural instincts in the world that got me through electrical engineering and also helped me earn free

beer at Trivia Nights because of my tendency to remember obscure knowledge. I even made a friend through the podcast, listener Lucas. Take it that's just Lucas. He was listening to your podcast while driving his bus and I recognized the familiar voices. So I just wanted to say thanks guys and that is from listener Daniel. So maybe that's how they met. They had the same first name. Right. Like I never thought I would have a brother but now I do. Daniel and Lucas together. Are you got anything else now? I got nothing at all. Well if you want to be like listener Daniel and let us know how long you've been listening,

we want to hear from you. You can get in touch with us just through a simple email, simple gesture, the gesture of wrapping it up, the gesture of spanking it on the bottom, and the gesture of early feeding at peanuts and sending it off to Stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude,

bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.