Peanuts are not really nuts, but they’re much more interesting than you might think. Even if you don’t eat them, you can appreciate how far they’ve spread in the world and how they’ve even inspired some gross banana-flavored candies!
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A few of my sources:
Peanuts and power in the Andes
Where are the peanuts? (the David Williams quote)
A brief history of peanut butter (Smithsonian)
Music: Jens East — Daybreak (ft. Henk) www.soundcloud.com/jenseast
Licence: Creative Commons Attribution V4.0
Transcription (remember, this is a direct transcription of what I said and is not actually how I write!):
Welcome to Nine Minutes of Wonder. I’m Betsy Hedberg. I hope this podcast will help you rekindle your sense of wonder for this awe-inspiring world. If you like what you hear in the next few minutes, please subscribe and share.
[sound of peanut shell cracking]
This peanut that I just cracked open is, you know, just an ordinary peanut. We’ve all seen these a million times.
I’m not going to eat it right now, but it’s a normal one. And I usually just crack it open and put the inside parts into my mouth pretty quickly, and then I get another one, and then that’s it.
But as you probably know by now, I like to take some time and think about how the things that we take for granted in our daily lives, like peanuts and so many other things, are actually pretty interesting if we pay attention.
Peanuts are actually interesting little seeds. And this is carrying on from the seed theme of a previous episode. I apologize in advance if you have a peanut allergy, but I hope you can still find some wonder in thinking about how one humble legume or seed has spread so far afield from its origins all the way to your local baseball park if you’re in America.
So an American can have peanuts at an afternoon baseball game and then have more in their kung pao chicken at a Chinese restaurant that night. Why is that? They are obviously two very different places, very different traditions. So let’s talk about that a little bit.
And hopefully by the end of this little chat you will find peanuts more interesting than you ever have before. The next time you see or eat a peanut, think about how far they’ve traveled.
Peanuts are in the delicious Mexican moles or sauces. Mole negro is one of my very favorite things. I don’t get to have it very often anymore living in Europe, but I do when I travel back to the U.S. There are also these crunchy coated peanuts in the Middle East. They look really good. I don’t even know how to pronounce the word at all, so I’m not even going to try.
Then you can find peanuts in Southeast Asian cooking. For example, chicken satay with peanut sauce and a lot of Thai food including pad Thai, which is actually from Thailand but it’s only been around since the early to mid 20th century there. Another one of my all-time favorites, maybe yours as well. Then there is the Chinese food. I mentioned kung pao chicken, which is actually from China, although it’s apparently been westernized as a lot of Asian food has.
You can also eat peanuts in many parts of West Africa, including Malian meat stew and Ghanaian peanut butter soup. Yum, that sounds good. And then Indian food often has peanuts.
In South America, there is picante de cuy. Do you know about that? This is, sorry if you have a pet guinea pig, but this is roasted guinea pig served in a sauce of ground peanuts, which are, as I’ll talk about in a minute, native to South America. It comes with roasted onions and garlic, which have been incorporated from European cuisine.
Now, I was in Peru a bunch of years ago, and one of the people I was with ordered this dish. It came on the table and honestly, you could tell it was a guinea pig. It was roasted, so it didn’t have any fur, but yeah, that’s what it was. And he said it tasted good, but I didn’t have any.
The night before, we had had dinner in the home of a family that had guinea pigs running around on their kitchen floor, but we didn’t eat any. And if I had asked, they might have cooked one up for me, but I wasn’t going to go there. I had guinea pig friends named Natalie and Xerox when I was a girl, and I decided I wasn’t going to eat any on my trip to Peru.
So peanuts are in many parts of the world, but where do they actually come from? The best information we have is that peanuts began in South America, probably east of the Andes Mountains. Then they were heavily cultivated in present-day Peru and Brazil, and then the Portuguese and Spanish introduced them to China and other parts of the world during the colonial trade era.
Peanuts were easy to store on ships, and they were considered an essential food. And of course this part of history is very sad and involved trading not only peanuts but also people, as peanuts were introduced from Africa to North America during the 18th-century slave trade. And the story relates to the colonization of many places that were doing just fine without peanuts, right? But still, I think this story shows how something that we take for granted nowadays is a lot more interesting and has traveled a lot farther than we may realize.
Archaeological research in Peru suggests that the ancient people of that area of coastal, actually of the coastal northern part of modern-day Peru, used peanuts mainly for rituals and burials, but not for everyday consumption. They have definitely found remnants of peanuts in ceremonial places, but not in people’s homes. The Moche culture of Peru buried their high-status people with peanuts to nourish them in their journeys to the afterlife.
And the Moche lord of Sipan was discovered in 1987 wearing a large necklace of gold and silver peanuts. I found a 2009 blog post with David Williams, a peanut expert from the Crop Trust, which you might remember from my earlier episode about seeds and the global seed vault. He discusses a theory about the meaning of peanuts and burial and afterlife of the Moche culture. And he writes, “When planted, the peanut grows and flowers above ground like any other plant, but then it buries its fruit underground where it germinates, growing and flowering and burying its fruit and so on and on for generations. Plus, the peanut shell is like a little coffin. Peanuts, because of their high protein and caloric value, as well as their lightweight durable packaging, make great travel food, particularly for the long journey to the afterlife.”
I think peanuts make great travel food too. I don’t eat them on planes anymore because we’re not supposed to do that, but good for traveling in the car anyway.
A lot more recently, peanuts became an American crop in the 19th century. They were mainly grown for oil, a cocoa substitute, livestock feed, and to feed poor people. So they weren’t popular with everyone, and they were not considered by the upper classes something that was suitable for most people to eat. But I guess they were considered good enough to feed to the poor people.
But then this guy named P.T. Barnum introduced hot roasted peanuts at his traveling circus in 1870 and they became a hit. I actually found an unused peanut bag from the Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus, although I don’t know what year, but I found it on eBay for $7.99 if you want one. It’s got the red and white stripes. It actually looks kind of familiar to me.
As an aside, if you are an American of a certain age, do you remember those squishy orange circus peanuts that sometimes appeared in Halloween bags and other candy collections? I never liked those, did you? They looked too fake for me, even when I loved candy when I was a kid. They’re shaped like peanuts, but they don’t have any peanuts in them at all. My husband remembers what they tasted like, and he makes a bad face just thinking about it. Apparently they’re still around but not so popular anymore. Do you remember what they tasted like if you’ve had them? Apparently they taste like bananas. I really don’t think I ever had one.
Anyway, back to real peanuts. In the early 20th century, the boll weevil wreaked havoc on the cotton crop in the American South and peanuts started to replace cotton in many areas. This is when the famous agricultural scientist George Washington Carver began spreading the word about the many uses of peanuts, and they became more popular than ever.
But George Washington Carver didn’t invent peanut butter. Instead, it’s very possible that the ancient people of modern-day Peru invented peanut butter. One source I found says that happened around 3,000 years ago. But if you do an online search, you get all sorts of ideas about where peanut butter was invented, so I’m not even going to go down that rabbit hole.
So okay, that’s all I’m going to say about peanuts for today. But they’re interesting, right? They have a history. They have been imitated in these orange styrofoam-like candies and they are served worldwide. Not every place in the world, but many places in the world.
So look for peanuts on the menus of restaurants from various cultures and countries, and appreciate how far their DNA has traveled. And if you like to eat peanuts, enjoy some today. Open one up and take a look at how something kind of dull actually is a very interesting little seed.