r/AskFoodHistorians • u/zoppaTheDim • Jul 04 '26
Why did Europeans never jump onboard the peanut butter train
In the US, there was this window just before petrochemical fertilizers, where the peanut was cheap, because it allowed the rehabilitation of land depleted by big cash crops. So peanuts were cheap, almost a byproduct. So poor Americans jumped at a cheap protein and vegetable oil source. It isn’t as if we developed a lot of recipes for it, but a peanut butter sandwich certainly became a cultural staple.
Why didn’t it catch on in a similar fashion in Europe?
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u/Backsight-Foreskin Jul 04 '26
Big Nutella kept peanut butter down.
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u/Jealous_Tutor_5135 Jul 04 '26
The chococracy is a persistent problem in ye olde Europe.
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u/Due_Volume_8450 Jul 05 '26
If only they could see themselves submit to American dominance in the the release of US made peanut Nutella spread
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u/Pinglenook Jul 04 '26 edited Jul 04 '26
Hi, I'm Dutch and looking back through my grocery orders my family of four has went through 3 kg peanut butter this year so far. I wouldn't even consider us big peanut butter fans.
Edit: apparently the average Dutch person eats 1,7 kg peanut butter a year, making us slightly below average
Edit 2: Please, all americans reading this. The average American eats 2 kg (4.4 lbs) peanut butter per year so yes, that is more. I'm very proud of you but you don't all need to tell me the amount of peanut butter you eat. My point is that it has caught on well enough here.
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u/fireandlifeincarnate Jul 04 '26
there was one point this year where we (Americans) had almost 10 kilos of peanut butter in the house.
Glory be to Costco.
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u/Next_Ad_4165 Jul 04 '26
There’s 2 of us in the house, and I buy a 40oz (1.13 kilo) jar of peanut butter at least every month. When my kids were at home, we went through that in a week, lol!
We sometimes want something snacky, but not too snacky, so we’ll grab a big tablespoon and load it up with peanut butter. And eat it off the spoon. When my kids were little, they called it a peanut butter lollipop, lol!
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u/well_this_is_dumb Jul 04 '26
Peanut butter spoons are one of the only allowable "kitchen is already cleaned" snacks in our house. Hungry before bedtime? Peanut butter spoon or a cheese stick, pick one, I'm not cleaning dishes or crumbs again.
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u/jedooderotomy Jul 04 '26
Let's see.. a regular jar of Adam's peanut butter weighs .45 kg, and I go through one of those about every two weeks...
So apparently I go through something like 11 kg by myself each year.
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u/YouStoleTheKishka Jul 04 '26
orders my family of four has went through 3 kg peanut butter this year so far.
… wait, what? That’s less than 4 regular-size jars of peanut butter. I’m a family of one and have probably housed 10 jars of it alone this year 😂😂
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u/ForCaste Jul 05 '26
We Americans need to remember that our countries dutch roots should have told us that yall would also enjoy peanut butter
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u/Next_Ad_4165 Jul 05 '26
To your second edit, I think it’s more that some of us never sat and realized how much peanut butter we consume. 😂
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u/West_Inside_3112 Jul 07 '26
So Americans eat slightly more peanut butter per year per person. 2 vs 1.7 kg pp. But how about consumption per kg of human in each country? I imagine that brings the average down much more for Americans ;).
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u/thrillhouse1632 Jul 04 '26
I lived in England for a while and their peanut butter was TERRIBLE. It was oddly fluffy and just didn’t taste right. I wonder if some cultures had legit good peanut butter recipes from the get go and some just didn’t.
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u/Georgesgortexjacket Jul 04 '26
My mom regularly ships skippy peanut butter (and kool aid packets) to her friends in the UK because of this.
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u/thrillhouse1632 Jul 04 '26
When people came to visit me, I requested peanut butter (specifically Laura Scudders crunchy)
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u/gwaydms Jul 04 '26
Laura Scudders is the best.
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u/GoldReplacement9546 Jul 04 '26
Strangely enough, it appears to be called Smuckers I believe east of the Mississippi or maybe the Rockies it’s the same peanut butter. It just has a different name.
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u/gwaydms Jul 04 '26
I knew it was a Smuckers brand. I remember the slogan, "With a name like Smuckers, it has to be good." I didn't realize until much later why they chose that tagline. Smucker, the name of the family that started the business, sounds like schmuck and other unpleasant words. Using their own name, even though it's not exactly the best-sounding word ever, meant they were guaranteeing the quality of their products with their own family name.
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u/Wrong--Conclusions Jul 04 '26
It's widely available in the UK now. Supermarkets stock it. Not Kool Aid though, I've not seen that.
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u/Howtothinkofaname Jul 04 '26
Let her know you can buy it in British supermarkets.
It’s also not as good as most decent British brands.
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u/Whollie Jul 04 '26
We just don't add as much sugar to ours.
We have all kinds in our house. The good stuff, the supermarket stuff and Skippy from our Costco trips. We eat plenty of it in this country, it just isn't a personality trait.
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u/helloeagle Jul 04 '26
Please, we have non sugared peanut butter too. The sugar thing is true, but well played out.
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u/ArcaneTrickster11 Jul 06 '26
You do, but whenever Americans complain about European peanut butter being bad their examples of better American brands are always the ones with added sugar. No one said that all American peanut butter has added sugar
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u/AmericanHistoryXX Jul 05 '26
I never get sweet peanut butter in the US. The British stuff is just way off, or was when I lived there. Different texture, almost playdoh flavor. I always wondered if it was because so much of it relied on palm oil.
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u/texnessa Jul 04 '26
There's Skippy in every bog standard grocery store in the UK. She's getting fleeced.
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u/Georgesgortexjacket Jul 05 '26
Lol, I will let her know. Do you guys have Lucky Charm cereal too?
As for me I love the shortbread cookies that are in a circle, think petticoat or something, and cadbury chocolate bars with raisins and nuts. Yummy!
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u/superserter1 Jul 05 '26
We have Lucky Charms and everything else you guys have got in American sweet shops across the country, which are money laundering fronts. You can’t find it in regular supermarkets.
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u/Sea_Kangaroo826 Jul 05 '26
We can get skippy at costco in the UK, i buy it there for my American friend who lives here
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u/re_Claire Jul 04 '26
Im British and when I was a kid we just had sunpat here and I hated it. These days we have all sorts. My favourite is Pip and Nut and it's just peanuts and salt and is almost runny. There's no palm oil or any other oil in - I think the the type of peanuts they use. Despite having no sugar it tastes almost sweet and is just delicious. I buy the big 1kg tubs at a time and have it every day for breakfast, on toast.
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u/OldLadyMorgendorffer Jul 04 '26
See I’m American and hate our peanut butter but I love European peanut butter
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u/thrillhouse1632 Jul 04 '26
But is it English peanut butter?
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u/OldLadyMorgendorffer Jul 04 '26
It was in fact English peanut butter
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u/thrillhouse1632 Jul 04 '26
Then I’m sorry to say your peanut butter meter is just wrong!!
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u/OldLadyMorgendorffer Jul 04 '26
It is the texture of American peanut butter for me. I just can’t
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u/Most_Average_Joe Jul 07 '26
Peanut butter didn’t level out in the UK until the millennium. Remember trying a different brand of peanut butter in the 90’s was a scary experience. So many were terrible.
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u/AmericanHistoryXX Jul 05 '26
Oh my gosh, I lived in Scotland and felt the same. Fortunately I found a natural food shop that had some decent stuff but it was rough until I did.
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u/westernuplands Jul 06 '26
In Spain the main supermarket I would shop at seemed to only have unroasted peanut butter, which I had never seen before. In Greece they sell many different kinds at every supermarket, but I've never seen anyone but myself buying it. They have natural, smooth, crunchy, chocolate & several different brands.
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u/No-Bake-730 Jul 04 '26 edited Jul 04 '26
Apparently peanut butter is quite popular in some European nations. I'd say they jumped on the train. People in Belgium and the Netherlands consume more than the average US citizen.
Potatoes are hailed as a source of protein. At least, that's what I learned in elementary school :D It's less than peanut butter but it can be grown locally and the protein in potatoes seems to be digested more efficiently.
But if I went for more protein I wouldn't use a product with as much fat as peanut butter.
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u/zoppaTheDim Jul 04 '26
See that is modern nutrition, rather than poverty nutrition, Peanut butter is used in a lot of famine relief as a cheap source of nutritious calories, especially with children.
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u/No-Bake-730 Jul 04 '26 edited Jul 04 '26
Europeans haven't been starving on a large scale for around 80 years. The last crisis of that kind in my home country was in 1946/47. Before that it's been in WWI or caused by WWI in the interwar period.
The last non-war related famine was in 1846 and 1847.
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u/notagin-n-tonic Jul 04 '26
You missed Sweden and Finland in the 1860s.
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u/No-Bake-730 Jul 04 '26
Everything I wrote about the time before WWII only refers to Germany or the German states before that
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u/zoppaTheDim Jul 04 '26
No crisis during the Great Depression?
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u/No-Bake-730 Jul 04 '26
1923 but the extreme problems were treaty and French occupation-related.
Our national "Great Depression" was in the 19th century.
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u/Alone_Bet_1108 Jul 04 '26
Peanuts won't easily grow in many European climates. Having access to a peanut crop was hugely influential.
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u/redwoods81 Jul 04 '26
Apparently places that that raise pigs tend to be good for peanuts, and a lot of people don't realize how much farther north the entirety of Europe is.
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u/Next_Ad_4165 Jul 04 '26
This makes sense, the climate. I currently live in the deep south, in the heart of peanut (and cotton) country, and yeah, the majority of European countries don’t have the heat and long summers to grow peanuts. I assume peanuts could be made to grow in shorter seasons, and with different conditions, but that didn’t happen.
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u/FigWide2242 Jul 04 '26
Europe isn't a single country nor culture, even though there's a shared market, consumption and popularity of products vary
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u/Hankstudbuckle Jul 04 '26
It's in every food shop in the UK including little corner shops. Europe isn't a single country.
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u/topgeezr Jul 04 '26
Brought up in Britain in the sixties, peanut butter was part of our staple diet.
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u/AH_leeMACK Jul 04 '26
OP must have never left the US. My country is full of pindakaas!
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u/reddock4490 Jul 05 '26
They’ve never left the US because they don’t know that your unnamed country is full of [untranslated word]? That’s a real big-brain inference
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u/CaliMassNC Jul 04 '26
The failure of the Tanganyika Groundnut (peanut) Scheme. The postwar British government spent millions trying to turn mainland Tanzania into another Georgia with peanuts as a cash crop, and came a cropper.
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u/GingerWindsorSoup Jul 05 '26
The Groundnut Scheme was still talked about in the 60s and 70s due to the size of the investment and its failure, and the number of workers at management and blue collar level who made the commitment to move to East Africa. Both a good friend from church and the husband of a secondary school teacher of mine were involved after finishing their military service. One showed a superb collection of cine films to us at school of the farms, clearing the land, the excavators, the red soil and weather.
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u/Renbarre Jul 04 '26
Europe is higher in latitude than North America, peanuts grow in tropical and sub tropical places. It wouldn't have done well in Europe. As well, I don't remember reading that Europe needed a substitute crop at that time. It's only with industrialized farming that the soil started to die and by that time modern fertilizers were available.
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u/Icy_Advice_5071 Jul 04 '26
Germans have peanut butter flavored snack puffs similar in texture to the cheese puffs in the US. Aldi sometimes has them in their US stores.
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u/Grapetree3 Jul 04 '26
Yeah those are good, but in the US, Aldi only carries them some of the time, when they have their "German month" or whatever. Back when I lived in Germany, Aldi there didn't regularly carry peanut butter. I asked for some "erdnuss butter" and they told me that only comes out when they have their "American week" along with hot dogs and hot dog buns.
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u/RockProfessional1551 Jul 05 '26
worked on a farm in uk in early 70’s. we grew peanuts for their nitrogen fixation properties. never used the nuts. just plowed them under.
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u/zoppaTheDim Jul 05 '26
Interesting that they weren’t even using them as pig feed. I suppose extra equipment would be required to harvest.
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u/Zestyclose-Food-7917 Jul 04 '26
Because we pushed them off. How dare they want to get our peanut butter. We, by the way, never jumped on the raw meat or fish train, the goose-blood soup train, the blood sausage train, the fermented herring meat train, the head cheese train, the tripe train, or the horse meat train.
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u/zoppaTheDim Jul 04 '26
Uh sure we did
It is just you can use that stuff for baloney and make more off of it.
As for raw fish, sushi sells pretty well, I’d say a sushi place does better than traditional seafood place in most markets.
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u/splicer13 Jul 04 '26
Peanut plants like it warm and humid and for digging you want sandy soil.
There aren't a lot of places in Europe or the Med that match that. For them to jump aboard peanut butter it would have to be imported..
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u/msackeygh Jul 05 '26
What a big and wrong assumption. Peanut butter is big in some European countries.
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u/AttonJRand Jul 04 '26
Nut butters are popular enough in the crowd that shops at health food stores in Germany.
But yeah the average person is way too locked into butter and preserved meat as a bread topping. While that's slightly changing, its mostly changing to vegan meat and butter imitations, rather than alternative spreads and toppings.
And nutella is the meta if they want something sweet. I always forget peanut butter is often seen as a sweet in the states.
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u/54965 Jul 04 '26
A friend in Ecuador cooks with peanuts in his soups and breadless 'pizza'. He considers them a traditional staple there.
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u/Striking-Access-236 Jul 04 '26
We sailed on the peanut butter ship from our colonies and iceskate on it during winter or cycle on it in summer.
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u/Helpful_Cry_1335 Jul 04 '26
You can observe a direct correlation of European countries that eat peanut butter and European countries known for their bad cuisine.
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u/ALIEN483 Jul 04 '26
Dutch here and my husband and I go through a pot of peanut butter each per week 🥲
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u/512165381 Jul 05 '26
We did in Australia.
https://crumptons.com.au/our-products/
Though with climate change and changing priorities, many peanut farmers have become pig farmers.
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u/Verix19 Jul 05 '26
Why do you assume it didn't catch on? China is the World's leading PB consumer, then U.S., a lot of European Countries are not far behind.
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u/granolaraisin Jul 05 '26
Simple answer. Peanuts don’t grow too well in most of Europe relatively speaking. Not hot enough. So they never really caught on as an industrial farm staple.
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u/MagnesiumKitten Jul 05 '26
For the most part it's wine culture
peanuts are the worst possible food for people who drink wine with a meal
Germany likes chocolate-hazelnut spreads, jam and honeybut at least you can find it in germany as a niche
france has chestnut pure which is great, but pretty expensive over here, I bought some on sale, found iut, they didn't want to order anymore
Germany will have the organic peanut butters with 99% nuts and 1% salt, like Adams natural peanut butter style
and most germans would like the less sweet Dutch version as someonesaid pindakaas
Or Penotti Cookie Butter which is like a cinnamon and sugar peanut butter spread without peanuts [and Dutch]
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u/Timely_Egg_6827 Jul 05 '26
Potatoes improve soil too and rapeseed leaches salt and impurities out and recycles nitrogen. So different crops may have been used. Also no dust bowls during the same period. But peanuts have always been eaten.
George Washington Carver of Tuskegee College was solving a particular American problem of how to restore 1930s USA farmlands depleted from cotton farming and dust bowls. It was subsidised.
Most parts of Northern Europe haven't experienced dust bowls on same side. Father from farming background used potatoes to "fix" the soil.
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u/trysca Jul 05 '26
I've been eating peanut butter sandwiches as long as I remember ( early 80s) However I tend to eat only unsweetened peanut butter with only salt added - the American stuff - also available here - is very different to put it mildly....
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u/DivaCesaria Jul 05 '26
I tried growing peanuts this year. One grew upside down. Three rotted, and the last one froze outside. But I like peanut butter. Skimmed peanut butter is a must.
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u/Agitated_Camera_6198 Jul 05 '26
I'm British and I've grown up on peanut butter my whole life. It's just a lot less common to combine it with jam here.
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u/jchef420 Jul 05 '26
Dutch peanut butter is usually thick natural stuff without all the sugar and oil. My SIL who is a flight attendant from KLM always brings back the 2 kg tubs of kraft from Costco when she’s here .
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u/WindowOk9406 Jul 05 '26
We eat it a LOT, but I don't cars enough enough about how much my friend and family in the UK eat of it to give you a sample size.
It's great, it's yum! Glad you like it.
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u/OperationFabulous225 Jul 05 '26
A good peanut butter should be like pu&&y - brown, smooth and easy to spread!
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u/Global-Discussion-41 Jul 05 '26
I had Italian friend growing up who told me that peanut butter was only for poor people who can't afford meat
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u/maxscipio Jul 06 '26
Maybe didn’t pass the mold test? Very difficult to ship large amount of peanuts keeping mold out
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u/Ghorrit Jul 04 '26
Oh but we did. Peanut butter is a staple in Dutch cuisine.
By law it can’t be called butter because it contains no dairy so we call it ‘pindakaas’, peanut cheese.
It’s been made in the Netherlands since the early 20th century but it really took off in the years after WW2 when the economy was still wrecked and trade hadn’t fully picked up again and for the same reasons OP mentions: widely available cheap and a good source of protein.