The Peanut Butter Wars
The Uncertain Hour
Marketplace
4.8 • 2.2K Ratings
🗓️ 10 November 2017
⏱️ 38 minutes
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Summary
It’s 1959 and Ruth Desmond, the gurney-climbing, cook-from-scratch co-founder of the Federation of Homemakers was prowling the halls of the FDA, about to earn her “peanut butter grandma” namesake. She stumbled upon this unassuming, but ultimately history-changing memo. It was four little paragraphs, a proposal to regulate one of the most popular foods in the country.
The government was trying to answer an existential question: how many additives can you put into a jar of peanut butter before it’s not peanut butter anymore? Trying to answer it kicked off a years-long battle that upended the, uh, peanut butter industrial complex. And honestly? Battles like this are how a lot of regulations get made in this country.
Welcome back to The Uncertain Hour. Where the things we fight the most about are the things we know the least about. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, or your favorite podcast app.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, I'm Chrissy Clark. And if this were one of those true crime shows, this is where that |
| 0:06.4 | as heard previously on montage would go. Of course, on the surface, federal regulations, |
| 0:12.8 | the wonky sounding, but you know, secretly fascinating subject of our show this season, |
| 0:18.2 | federal regulations do not on their surface lend themselves to the tropes of true crime. |
| 0:24.0 | But then again, this show is all about scratching beneath the surface to tell a deeper story, |
| 0:29.5 | like the story I started telling you last episode about that ridiculed moment in the history |
| 0:34.0 | of federal regulations. When, as President Jimmy Carter once put it, it took 12 years and a |
| 0:41.2 | hearing record of a 100,000 pages for the FDA to decide what percentage of peanuts they ought to be |
| 0:49.7 | in peanut butter. And actually, this peanut butter case kind of does lend itself to a courtroom |
| 0:55.7 | drama style montage. So let's do it. As heard previously on the uncertain hour, the peanut butter |
| 1:04.1 | grandma, very serious homemaker, she always cooked from scratch. During World War II, |
| 1:11.2 | the food science industry went to work and totally changed the American food supply. |
| 1:18.0 | You see the difficulty with most of these chemicals is the intake of them doesn't make |
| 1:23.5 | it the comedian play. And she said, oh my god, I'm killing my husband. |
| 1:30.7 | She calls the FDA and they tell her, when on you attend this hearing, we're going to have |
| 1:36.8 | based off against all these suits. And here are the hearings. Oh wow, a jar of peanut butter. |
| 1:48.8 | There's a little bit of peanut butter left around that room. |
| 1:58.3 | Welcome back to the uncertain hour, where the things we fight the most about are the things we know |
| 2:03.9 | the least about. Of course, right now, one of the things people are fighting a lot about is |
| 2:10.0 | federal regulations. And that brings us to the second part of this epic peanut butter saga. |
| 2:18.3 | And we're going to go really, really deep on the regulation of peanut butter this episode |
| 2:23.8 | as mundane and random as it seems, because it gives you this rare behind-the-scenes glimpse into |
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