>Kellogg’s “food compound” involved boiling nuts and grinding them into an easily digestible paste for patients at the Battle Creek Sanitarium, a spa for all kinds of ailments.
That sounds similar to boiled peanuts (except without the grinding), a favorite in the U.S. southern region. I've never had them but would like to. According to Wikipedia, there are even some claims that eating boiled peanuts not only circumvents peanut allergies but can actually help reduce them.
I grew up with the Skippy-style peanut butter, but eventually switched to the type which is nothing but peanuts and salt (no sugar, no hydrogenation). Stirring in the oil is not that hard with a reasonably-sized jar.
When I was a teenager (many decades ago) I tried to engineer a cheap, nutritious diet for myself, and a cup of peanuts every day turned out to be a great way to get a lot of protein for not much cost. Still have PB sandwiches several times a week even now.
A tip to keep the oil from separating: I add about 5ml of water to a jar of peanut butter and stir in well. This creates an emulsion that thickens the peanut butter and prevents the oil from separating out. It improves the spreadability as well.
Save yourself a huge mess and don't try using an electric handheld mixer to do the initial oil stir...I got peanut butter EVERYWHERE. It's a nightmare to clean.
I'm surprised there is no mention of Marcellus Gilmore Edson [0]. He was a pharmacist from Montréal who patented a method to make an early version of peanut butter, more than a decade before the Kellogg's patent mentioned in the Smithsonian article.
Have you had COVID, and experienced any of the loss-of-taste symptoms?
Somehow, I've managed to avoid COVID. Or at least, the antibody test that I took just before my first vaccination shot last year indicated that I had never been infected. If I have had any post-vaccination COVID infection, then it was totally asymptomatic.
Peanut butter tastes no different for me today than it did three years ago.
I'm curious to hear what the total impact of crop rotation and other items are on modern farming. I know we are always taught that that is the correct way, and yet we also hear how there is a single banana in main use. We even learn wines by the name of the grape that is used. Is there more crop rotation in place than I give credit for?
I feel that this goes to a lot of produce, honestly. There are only two main lines of coffee. Tea is a single plant, if I'm not mistaken. Avocado is rather homogeneous.
My parents are from Canada, and when my dad was in the Navy in the 1980s, he was deployed to the UK. His biggest story is that they couldn’t buy peanut butter and Kraft Dinner except at the Base, which was obviously a problem. I travelled to the UK recently and asked someone there about those two items. Peanut butter is available now, but not that popular, but Kraft Dinner was unknown and frankly seemed disgusting to her! Which is fair, but its comfort food in Canada.
Kraft Dinner (or just KD( is something special though! It's not just boxed macaroni and cheese, it has a fake cheese neon orange sauce (at least it used to, now it's apparently safer) with its own special taste. It's peak Canadian comfort food that the other boxed meals don't match. They're all gross, but KD has no peers.
> Peanut butter is available now, but not that popular
I might be an outlier but my family eats peanut butter all the time, and you wouldn't have any trouble finding it even in small local shops. Peanut butter and j(elly|am) sandwiches are less popular but I maintain that they're America's greatest export.
Ah, yes, Skippy Peanut Butter: another erstwhile proud product of Alameda, California--the town that brought you Perforce, and which remains ready for all your nut-butter-addicted tech venture needs.
(DISCLOSURE: Commenter received no consideration from the City of Alameda for this comment.)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/food/1988/1...
She was the underdog who took on agro-industrial companies to ensure peanut butter contained peanuts and not sawdust.