in
august 1976, Tom Miller a University of Colorado student pushed a peanut to the
top of 14,II 0-foot Pikes peak with his
nose. It took him 4 days 23 hours, 47 minutes and three seconds.Prisoners
in a California jail recently went on strike for more peanut butter and jelly
sandwiches. They won.Caught
without shaving cream on a camping trip Sen. Barry Goldwater once shaved with
peanut butter. It's a darn good lotion, he says if you don't mind smelling like
a peanut. Particularly now they have a former peanut farmer in the white House;
peanuts are on their way coming a national obsession. Americans munch, on
average nearly five pound of peanuts a year twice what they are 15 years ago
more than half of his being gobbled up as peanut butter. Underground gourmets
slather the "people’s pate " on tuna-fish or liverwurst sandwiches,
chili beans , meatballs, hot dogs, grilled hot corn, apples, bananas, celery,
carrot sticks , pickles and pancakes.As
buttery spread the peanut has flown to the moon on space shots. In soup it is
served at new York’s elegant welder Astoria
hotel. As an oil , it is a base for everything from penicillin to axle grease metal polish and hundreds of other products
including dynamite. Scientists have even found a high pressure high temperature
method for converting the peanut's carbon content into industrial diamonds.
Last October
the National Peanut Festival in Do than. ala,drew 300,000 peanut enthusiasts.
During the festival parade down Dothan's main street a concrete mixer spewed
thousands of peanuts to the cheering throng. But the high point was a white Plymouth
sedan with a gas turbine engine that ran on peanut oil.ye
north Americans are late comers to peanut worship. peanut decorated pottery has
turned up in ancient Peruvian tombs. And among the treasures that Spanish and Portuguese
explorers carried home from south America were the peanut kernels that Indians
used for money, food, medicine and status symbols from Europe , traders took
the peanut to Africa where it's cultivation spread rapidly.The
peanut arrived in colonial America as cheap sustenance on slave ships; from
there it became chiefly pig fodder. After the peanut helped feed the hard
pressed confederate Army during the civil war, tradition has it that union
soldiers took it home to grow in their gardens and to put into Christmas
stockings.
