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The Debunker: Who Invented Peanut Butter?

by Ken Jennings

Do you celebrate National Peanut Day every September 13? Of course, we all do! It's a cruel coincidence that the peanut's big moment comes every fall, just as kids are returning to their increasingly peanut-free schools. If you're not allergic, you probably love peanuts in your trail mix, on sundaes, or in sandwiches (butter form only). But how much do you really know about the protein-rich foodstuff? Jeopardy!'s Ken Jennings is here to tell us that a lot of your favorite facts about this beloved snack are just plain nuts.

The Debunker: Who Invented Peanut Butter?

George Washington Carver was one of the most celebrated American intellectuals of his time. As a freed slave who rose from poverty to become a successful botanist at a time when nearly all educational and professional doors were closed to African-Americans, Carver was a powerful icon of black talent and achievement. He consulted with world leaders from Teddy Roosevelt to Mahatma Gandhi. But that doesn't mean that Carver's legacy is purely symbolic. He also pioneered methods of crop rotation that saved the farms of countless poor Southerners whose cotton and tobacco fields were failing due to poor soil and hungry bugs.

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Carver was able to get a lot of sharecroppers off the cotton-and-tobacco train by extolling the virtues of alternative crops like peanuts and sweet potatoes, and researching new markets for them. His popular pamphlets on the subject eventually described over 300 new culinary and industrial uses for peanuts: peanut hand lotion, peanut paint, peanut leather dye, peanut shampoo, peanut laxatives. In Carver's peanutopia, houses could be built of peanut wallboard backed with peanut insulation. Cars would run on peanut gasoline, and their workings would be lubricated with peanut grease. Full meals could be served from mock peanut veal, mock peanut asparagus, and peanut meal bread, all washed down with a delicious glass of "Peanut Orange Punch."

But George Washington Carver, for all his remarkable accomplishments, did not invent peanut butter. He did include a peanut butter recipe (basically: "put lightly roasted peanuts in a meat grinder") in his 1916 bulletin How to Grow the Peanut, but this wasn't a new discovery. The Aztecs and Incas had been mashing roasted peanuts into a paste centuries earlier. The first patent for U.S. peanut butter was issued to Montreal inventor Marcellus Gilmore Edson in 1884. But the peanut butter of Edson and Carver's day wouldn't look too appetizing in a modern sandwich: it was a goopy, gritty ointment. It wasn't until 1922 that a California businessman named Joseph Rosefield would invent the hydrogenation and churning process used to make today's modern, creamy peanut butter. Rosefield named his new product after a popular newspaper comic character of the day: Skippy.

Quick Quiz: George Washington Carver is buried at what historic Alabama school, where he headed the agriculture department?

Ken Jennings is the author of eleven books, most recently his Junior Genius Guides, Because I Said So!, and Maphead. He's also the proud owner of an underwhelming Bag o' Crap. Follow him at ken-jennings.com or on Twitter as @KenJennings.