More about peanut butter than you want to know: "Creamy & Crunchy"

When I was around ten years old, I ate a Peter Pan peanut butter sandwich, no jelly, for lunch every day -- on Wonder Bread. Peanut butter came in a reusable drinking glass with a lid that had to be pried up, and that summer every lid had a different image of a character from Walt Disney's movie Peter Pan. I collected something like 13 of 14 lids -- my favorite was Tinker Bell. Of course I don't have the lids any more, but I found one picture (above) of a few of my least-favored lids that were once sold on E-Bay.

When I started reading Creamy & Crunchy: An Informal History of Peanut Butter, the All-American Food by Jon Krampner, I expected to learn more about this and other popular jingles and advertising campaigns for various brands of the incredibly popular spread. But instead of a review of what I think of as popular culture, I found a pretty plodding history of the agricultural and industrial processes used to make peanut butter. Krampner never mentions the Disney promotions at all -- just a bit about advertising Skippy and Jif. He documents various salmonella contamination scandals and regulatory issues at length, which is reasonable, but doesn't really convey what makes peanut butter so popular that people keep eating it anyway.

The plodding wouldn't be so bad, but the book is incredibly repetitive. For example, the author must have mentioned 10 times that the boll weevil's destruction of the cotton industry around the turn of the 20th century was a cause of the increase in peanut farming in the South. The explanations of the various chemical processes that have been devised to make peanut butter taste creamier are repeated again and again -- maybe there are a few details different, but only a food chemist could care. He constantly re-hashes the history of the early families whose plants made peanut butter. Sometimes I had the feeling I was reading the same sentence over and over again.

I got through the whole book, always hoping it would be more like three books Krampner mentioned as his models: Mark Kurlansky's Cod, John McPhee's Oranges, and Steve Almond's Candyfreak. Those are really good books. I wish this one had come up to the standard they set.