History of Peanut Butter
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For many, peanut butter is a must on the breakfast table, in the sandwich carried to work, or simply as comfort food. Even though it is said to have been first discovered in mummy tombs in Peru, peanut butter is actually quite a young food.
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Dr. John Kellogg, the man who made corn flakes popular, created peanut butter in 1890, as a protein substitute for those with no teeth. The process to manufacture peanut butter was actually formulated by George A. Bayle, Jr., while Abrose W. Straub was issued a patent for a peanut butter machine in 1903.
The 1904 St. Louis Universal Exposition by concessionaire C. H. Sumner was where peanut butter first came into prominence, where it was introduced as a health food. Things got even better when Dr. George Washington Carver, the innovative agricultural scientist, came out with an better type of peanut butter.
The commercial avatar of peanut butter took shape in 1922, when J. L. Rosefield of Rosefield Packing Company of Alameda, California, came up with the ideal process to preserve peanut butter so that it would not get spoilt. This new, commercially packed butter was brought to the market as Skippy®, and the public loved the new, creamier and smoother version of the peanut butter. Federal law requires all products marked as peanut butter must have a minimum of ninety percent, and the balance 10 percent should be sweeteners, salts and stabilizers.
A strange fact is that even though most of the peanuts grown in the US are used to produce peanut butter, what is consumed by the majority of Americans is the imported variety!
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