Peanut Power
In August 1976, Tom Miller, a University of Colorado student, pushed a peanut to the top of 14, 110-foot Pikes Peak with his nose. It took him 4 days, 23 hours, 47 minutes and 3 seconds.
Prisoners in a California jail recently went on strike for more peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches. They won.
Caught without shaving cream on a camping trip, Sen. Barry Goldwater once shaced with peanut butter. “It’s a darn good lotion,” he says, “if you don’t mind smelling like a peanut.”
Particularly now they have a former peanut farmer in the White House, peanuts are on their way to be coming a national obsession. Americans munch, on average, nearly five pounds of peanuts a year-twice waht they are 15 years ago-more than half of this being gobbled up as peanut butter. Underground gourmets slather the “people’s pate” on tuna-fish or livermurst sandwiches, chili beans, meatballs, hot dogs, grilled hot corn, apples, bananas, celery, carrot sticks, pickles and pancakes.
As a buttery spread, the peanut has flown to the moon on space shots. In soup, it is served at New York’s elegant Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. As an oil, it is a base for everything from penicillin to axle grease, metal polish, and hundreds of other products, in cluding dynamite, Scientists have even found a high-pressure, high-temperature method for convering the peanut’s carbon content into industrial diamonds.
Last October, the National Peanut Festival in Dothan, Ala, drew 300,000 peanut enthusiasts. During the festival parade down Dothan’s main street, a concrete mixer spewed thousands of peanuts to the cheering throng. But the high point was a white Plymouth sedan with a gasturbine that ran on peanut oil. Even resist an occasional rendezvous with peanut butter.
Yet North Americans are latecomers to peanut worship. Peanut-decorated pottery has turned up in ancient Peruvian tombs. And among the treasures that Spanish and Portuguese explorers carried home from South America were the peanut kernels that Indians used for money, food, medicine and status symbols. From Europe, traders took the peanut to Africa, where its cultivation spread rapidly.
The peanut arrived in colonial America as cheap sustenance on slave ships; from there, it became chiefly pig fodder. After the peanut helped feed the hard-pressed Confederate Army during the Civil War, tradition has it that Union soldiers took it home to grow in their gardens and to put into Christmas stockings.
Yet, until the early 1900s, peanuts were not widely known. Then along came George Washington Carver, a slave-born professor at Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute. By 1915, the boll weevil had devastated the South’s cotton crop, and Carver persuaded farmers to burn off their ravaged cotton fields and devote far more acreage to this astonishing little peanut plant. Before his death in 1943, he had come up with more than 300 agricultural, industrial and medical uses for the peanut, among them a high-protein liquid that has saved the lives of million of undernourished children in Africa and Asia.
Some Georgia delegates to the 1976 Demonstratic National Convention even went so far as to propose making the peanut the national tree. They were better politicians than botanists, obviously, for the peanut grows not on a tree but on a bush. And the peanut itself is not a nut. It is a legume vegetable (Arachis hypogaea), a cousin to the black-eyed pea. Indeed, in much of the South, peanut are known as goober peas. Unlike the other pea and bean legumes, however, the peanut shoots its pod under the soil.
Peanuts (usually planted in April or May) grow in long, bright-green rows on 18-inch-high bushes, which camouflage one of the largest underground movements in the farm world. After the small, yellow blossoms pollinate themselves, the fertilized heads send a hair-thin stem or “peg” down into the earth. Tere, some three inches deep and quite apart from the root system, the warm months. The peanut plant can sit out a dry spell for months until rain fulfills its one - to four-kernel destiny in the papery shell, or hull.
The harvest produces one of our most nourishing fods. The peanut is 26-percent protein-a higher percentage than in most meats, whole milk or cheese. It also contains niacin, thiamine and other vitamin-B components, plus 11 of the 13 essential minerals.
With its 5-4 calories (per gram) each kernel is a veritable pep pill. One pound of roasted peanuts has the energy equivalent of two pounds of hamburger, eight pints of whole milk or 36 medium-sized eggs. One ounce of peanut butter-costing about six cents-provides enough energy for 20 minutes of swimming or 45 minutes of walking. Despite a high calorie count, the peanut has no cholesterol. And its oil, about 80 percent unsaturated fat, is ideal for low-cholesterol diets.
The peanut now ranks as one of America’s largest farm crops. Worth some $770 million at the farm level in 1977, the peanut harvest in 16 states (42 percent of it in Georgia) surpassed the national production of tomatoes, apples and oranges. Worlwide, America ranked third in peanut production, with 1.8 million tons, after India and China.
Yet, in one way at least, peanuts have come to repersent too much of a good thing. American peanut production has zoomed even faster than consumption. So, Uncle Sam has stepped in with price supports, gobbling up an estimated $1-billion worth of surplus peanuts in the past 40 years.
With the business in school lunches burgeoning, one enterprising company has developed a machine that turns out 5000 peanut-butter sandwiches an hour. Other companies are jumping on the peanut bandwagon, too-selling all types of appliances for do-it-yourself peanut butter. Packaged in everything from six-ounce snack jars to five-pound plastic pails, peanut butter now outsells all jams, jellies and preserves combined, making it the 14th-most-purchased item in supermarkets.
For president, potentate, pundit or sandwich lover, uses of the peanut seem almost endless. Ingenuity’s the only limit. In the 1920s, when playwright Charles MacArthur first met actress Helen Hayes, he offered his future wife some peanuts in a crumpled paper bag, saying, “I wish they were emeralds.” Returning from World War II 20 years later, he gave his wife a necklace of emeralds in a paper bag, saying, “I wish they were peanut.” That could well be the rallying cry for today’s-and tomorrow’s-peanut lovers.
