Are you a fan of peanut paste? Perhaps you enjoy it on a sandwich, or with celery and carrot sticks. Maybe you’re one of those strange people who eat peanut butter with apple. Or maybe you can’t get past the first line of this article and are internally screaming, “It’s peanut butter, not peanut paste!”
If you are like me, then you have probably gotten into an argument with someone about whether the proper term for peanut butter is peanut paste, or vice versa. I remember mentioning peanut paste in a conversation and one of the people in the circle said “Peanut paste? Why would you call it paste?”
Well, there is actually a very good reason. In 1884, the Canadian chemist Marcellus Edson created and patented a type of paste created from peanuts, which he gave to people who had trouble chewing regular food. Around a decade later, in 1895, Dr. John Kellogg of cornflakes fame developed a more refined method for creating a similar peanut spread, which he marketed as ‘peanut butter’. Ever since, peanut butter has been the accepted name in the United States, and around most of the world.
However, things changed in several states of Australia in the late 1920s. Vegetable-based butter alternatives such as margarine were becoming more widespread and the dairy industry was concerned. As a result, the Departments of Agriculture in Queensland, South Australian and Western Australia banned calling any food “butter” unless it was made from dairy. Now although this ruling was primarily to stop margarine being labelled as butter, it nevertheless applied to peanut butter — which is definitely not a dairy product! Consequently, peanut butter sold in these states had to be rebranded as peanut paste. This occurred from around 1930 until the 1970s, when the naming regulations were loosened again. So if you go into Woolies today, it’s all labelled as peanut butter. However, the name peanut paste remained part of the everyday parlance in Queensland and the other two states.
So that makes sense why most people I knew growing up in Queensland referred to this delectable spread as peanut paste, while others from New South Wales and Victoria only know it as peanut butter. Has that been your experience? And given that it has no dairy at all, do you think we should call it peanut butter or paste?
