Smooth moves, crunchy truths: On the hunt for the perfect – if morally ambiguous – peanut butter
September is a peanut butter month. Whole Foods, Loblaws, Metro the stores have put out their brands prominently on the end aisles, along with school safe and other alternatives. Its also been in the news. As soy-based peanut butter lookalikes such as Wowbutter come on and off the menu in school boards across the country, the American Academy of Pediatrics has recommended that high risk babies be exposed to peanut butter in their first year not kept away from it, as previously thought.
What is clear is how much we all apparently want to eat peanut butter, in spite of the increasingly loaded nature of this once-apparently innocuous food. Nine in 10 Canadian households have bought peanut butter in the past three months, according to the Canadian Peanut Councils pleasingly named newsletter, In a Nutshell. We consume it at surprisingly disparate times of day; breakfast is dominant (72 per cent), but 12 per cent of households have peanut butter at dinner.
I could count 12 per cent of my own dinners as peanut butter, not necessarily out of planning, but because of the number of times I return home from some event where there was no real food, to stand on one leg, still in my dress, and eat peanut butter on rice cakes. My fridge at home is normally stocked with both junk and healthy kinds, almond butter (the result of an ongoing, if plaintive, effort to eat more alkaline food), and a jar of Sunbutter left by a peanut-allergic friend, whose habit of eating it with celery has stayed with me long after the visit had ended.
Peanut butter has a solid history as a survival food. It was a Canadian pharmacist (Montreal-born Marcellus Gilmore Edson) who first patented the product, in 1884, as a source of nutrition for invalids. It has long been touted as an economical source of vegetarian protein (even though it contains a lot less of it than we think; about 4 grams a tablespoon). A nutritional paste called Plumpynut developed by a French pediatrician is considered by some to be a potential saviour of lives in the developing world partly because the taste of peanut butter is so liked by children worldwide.
I thought of this recently when I arrived at a friends borrowed apartment in New York, rattled and starving. In the relatively un-gentrified neighbourhood I was unable to find any familiar brands (notably Cream Nut, a kind of retro-health brand that has been around for 80 years). I would have settled for the exuberant Peanut Butter & Co., which comes in a dozen flavours including the inevitable Pumpkin Spice; my preference was for something organic (for health) and chunky (for substance). I went far afield to fancy-looking delis and random supermarkets, only to leave empty-handed. The search for peanut butter soon became bound up in other things, such as the safety of home and my own competence.
I suddenly realized that peanut butter was the only thing that binds this life Im living. In this case I couldnt bend the conditions of my actual need to Jif and Skippy. You loser, I thought, have you become so privileged that you cant handle what is normal for most people? Its a far cry from the place I come from (Saskatchewan), where peanut butter comes in a tub from the Coop. My father buys it in 5 kg tubs and eats it through the winter. I love that, too.
I first started to write about shopping 15 years ago, and one of the things that led me to the subject was the sense that the kind of experience Im talking about isnt about shopping per se. Its about identity, and feelings of survival, and the burden of decision-making even when the pursuit is objectively trivial. One anthropologist, Daniel Miller, sums up a case study about a graduate student shopping for her baby: You had a choice of a well-known brand and the supermarkets own brand. The latter was a good deal cheaper and you are in more debt than you care to admit to yourself. But nothing is more important than that child, the mere thought of her sends waves of emotion through you. We are all children when it comes to peanut butter.
This week, Peanut Corporation of America owner Stewart Parnell was sentenced to the equivalent of life imprisonment for knowingly releasing contaminated products, including peanut butter, from his companys factory; at the peak of the epidemic, around 2008-2009, a known 714 people had fallen ill of salmonella poisoning (nine actually died). A threat to a primary food cuts us close to home. In the words of the CNN story about this weeks verdict, Suddenly, one of Americas favourite foods had turned into a killer.
I found my peanut butter through a friend who kindly directed me to Doughnut Plant. I wouldnt have thought of this local landmark, a gourmet dot on the surrounding landscape, as a source of anything other than enormous, cushion-sized doughnuts. But what glazes their famed PB&J doughnuts is a surprisingly good peanut butter, now carried by the jar: dark-roasted, concentrated, devoid of additives. It is a peanut butter to eat, standing on a leg, overlooking the city. At $8, it wouldnt the solution for everyone, at all times. For a lonely Canadian in Manhattan, it provided a taste of home.
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I was talking to a submariner last week, and peanut butter is a life saver in an environment that sits below the ocean surface for weeks or months at a time. They leave port stocked with fresh food, but that has a two week shelf life before it spoils.
I eat peanut butter as part of my breakfast almost every day. It is a comfort food and fortunately I have no allergies. The very best peanut butter I have ever had is produced in a home kitchen by a woman in Manila, Philappines - all natural with nothing added - a little grainy to make it just a bit crunchy. Since my brother lives there I'm fortunate to get it now and then. I like it with strawberry jam. In a sandwich it's great with slices of banana or for something with a little more texture variance, thin apple slices. It's best on chalah (egg bread), but as long as the bread is very fresh almost any bread will do.
It was news to me that it was first patented in Canada, but I doubt that it was invented there. Surely it has been around for more than 130 years.
In the movie "Indian Summer" about alumni campers returning for a reunion at a summer camp in Algonquin Park, Ontario, there is a scene in the kitchen that displays the reality that peanut butter is the greatest thing second only to the proverbial elixer of life, when one's mind is slightly altered by a certain illegal green plant.
By the way, peanuts aren't nuts, they're legumes. However, peanut butter does have lots of health benefits:
http://www.healthambition.com/health-benefits-of-peanut-butter/
You don't have to explain to a person who's also been there (and done that).
Fresh made nut butters are a treat to eat.
I like them with deep purple Concord grape jam.
Theyenhance the flavor of any fresh fruit or veggie on which you place them.
They are also a good long term complex carbohydrate. For anyone with Diabetes Mellitus, Type I or II, if you need to treat a hypoglycemic (low blood sugar) episode try this.Stabile your blood sugar with a glucose tablet or other 10- 20 gram of simple carbohydrate. When your reading is normal have some nut butter on a wholeancient grain cracker or bread. It will insure you don't slip back into blood sugar levels lower than acceptable.
Buying hint. Look for jars where the oil is on the top. Once homogenized there are health problems. If you don't make your own, go to a health food store or get non-hydrogenated nut butters. Its better for your heart that way. A good nut butter is simply fresh ground nuts and some salt. Use the KISS method. Keep it short and simple. If possible, crush the fruit you use to make your own jams and jelly's to go with it.
Nothing beats home made for health and economic benefits.
This Sukkot have some nut butter and fruit when you dine out under the stars.
Chag Sukkot Sameach for those celebrating this time of happiness.
Goodmunching to one and all.
Enoch.
I love peanut butter...on everything!!!
Yes, peanut butter goes so well with grape jam, in fact there is a common commercial brand that puts them together in a jar.
P.S. Chag Sukkot Sameach to you - in my memory there was a time when I helped build the temple sukkot. Unfortunately there is no way I can do one now. As it happens it is the middle of Mid-Autumn Festival here, and I LOVE eating the moon cakes.
Trouble is it makes one pretty thirsty, and the best thirst quencher for peanut butter is cold milk.