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. It’s 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 Council’s 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 Plumpy’nut 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 friend’s 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 in- evitable 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 I’m living. In this case I couldn’t bend the conditions of my actual need to Jif and Skippy. “You loser,” I thought, “have you become so privileged that you can’t handle what is ‘normal’ for most people?” It’s 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 I’m talking about isn’t about “shopping” per se. It’s 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 wellknown brand and the supermarket’s 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 company’s 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 week’s verdict, “Suddenly, one of America’s favourite foods had turned into a killer.”

I found “my” peanut butter through a friend who kindly directed me to Doughnut Plant. I wouldn’t 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 wouldn’t the solution for everyone, at all times. For a lonely Canadian in Manhattan, it provided a taste of home.