Peanut Butter Trivia
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48 free Peanut butter trivia questions with answers. Peanut butter has a stranger history than the jar lets on. George Washington Carver did not invent it, the Aztecs beat everyone to it, the Dutch were banned from calling it butter, and the man who stopped the oil separating went on to invent chunky. This quiz covers the whole spread: the patents and health-institute origins, the brand battles between Jif, Skippy and Peter Pan, the PB&J, the fluffernutter and the Elvis sandwich, and the candy that grew out of it, from Reese's Penny Cups to Nutter Butter. There is peanut science too: why a peanut is a legume and grows underground, how the USDA screens for aflatoxin, and why Israeli babies who eat Bamba have fewer allergies. About a third of the questions are easy enough for a lunchbox crowd; the rest will test a food historian. Every answer has been checked against a primary source, mostly Wikipedia's peanut and peanut butter articles, and each question shows its citation.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Before they are ground into peanut butter, how are the peanuts usually prepared?
Dry roasting
Dry roasting comes first at modern plants. One early health-spa recipe boiled the nuts instead, and today's peanut butter fans would likely find that version bland.
Q 02Despite its name, what is a peanut botanically?
A legume
A legume, like peas and beans: bacteria in its root nodules put nitrogen back into the soil, which is why farmers rotate peanuts with hungrier crops such as cotton.
Q 03Which civilisations are credited with the earliest form of peanut butter?
The Aztecs and Incas
The Aztecs and Incas both ground peanuts into a paste, centuries before the spread was reinvented and first patented in the 1880s.
Q 04Marcellus Gilmore Edson, who patented an early peanut butter in the US in 1884, was a chemist from which country?
Canada
Canada: Edson, a Montreal chemist, meant his peanut paste to be mixed with sugar to make candy, and there is no evidence it was ever sold as a spread.
Q 05Which cereal pioneer and sanitarium doctor patented a peanut paste in the 1890s for patients unable to chew?
John Harvey Kellogg
John Harvey Kellogg served it at his Battle Creek Sanitarium, so peanut butter began life as a health food for wealthy spa guests before it became a cheap staple.
Q 06Which famous American is often wrongly credited with inventing peanut butter?
George Washington Carver
George Washington Carver urged Southern farmers to grow peanuts and devised hundreds of uses for them, but the spread had been patented several times before his famous peanut bulletin came out in 1916.
Q 07Which process did Joseph Rosefield apply to peanut butter in the 1920s to stop its oil separating?
Hydrogenation
Hydrogenation turns some of the oil semi-solid so it stays blended. The stable spread could be shipped across the country and left on shelves, which cleared the way for the first national brands.
Q 08Which peanut butter brand, launched in 1932, is credited with the first 'chunky' style?
Skippy
Skippy's founder stirred fragments of crushed peanuts back into his smooth spread to create the chunky style, and he also gave the brand the wide-mouth jar that became standard.
Q 09Procter & Gamble's Jif tasted sweeter than its 1950s rivals because its recipe added sugar and what?
Molasses
Molasses and sugar sweetened Jif, and recipe changes like these set off a 12-year fight with regulators, settled in 1971 by a rule that peanut butter must be 90 per cent peanuts.
Q 10Why was peanut butter barred from using that name in Dutch shops in the 1940s?
'Butter' was dairy-only
'Butter' was dairy-only under the Dutch Butter Act, a rule aimed at margarine makers; the Dutch call the spread pindakaas, literally 'peanut cheese'.
Q 11Which US state grows about half of all American peanuts?
Georgia
Georgia grows roughly half of America's peanuts, and its best-known grower, Jimmy Carter, left the Navy to take over his family's peanut business before he entered politics.
Q 12The early-2000s internet meme 'Peanut Butter Jelly Time' starred a pixelated dancing what?
Banana
Banana: the 2002 Flash loop set a dancing banana to a novelty rap by Miami's Buckwheat Boyz, and it spread so far that sitcoms and Family Guy went on to reference it.
Q 13Plumpy'Nut, a peanut paste eaten straight from the sachet, changed famine relief because starving children no longer had to be treated where?
In hospital
In hospital: older treatments were milk powders that staff had to mix with clean water, while the paste needs no water or cooking, so parents can feed it to a child at home.
Q 21A 'fluffernutter' pairs peanut butter with what other spread?
Marshmallow creme
Marshmallow creme and peanut butter were first paired in print during World War I, as the 'Liberty Sandwich'; the fluffernutter name only arrived with a 1960 advertising campaign for the spread.
Q 22The fluffernutter has been proposed as the official state sandwich of which New England state?
Massachusetts
Massachusetts lawmakers took it up after a state senator tried in 2006 to limit how often schools could serve the sandwich, and a colleague hit back with a bill to honour it.
Q 23H. B. Reese created his peanut butter cups in 1928 after working on the dairy farms of which chocolate company?
Hershey
Q 14Which peanut-butter-flavoured corn puff, a favourite of Israeli babies, is linked to Israel's low rate of peanut allergy?
Bamba
Bamba is fed to Israeli infants so widely that a 2008 study found them about one-tenth as likely to have a peanut allergy as Jewish children in Britain, which prompted trials of feeding peanut early.
Q 15Peanut butter is prized for its protein, but about half its weight is which nutrient?
Fat
Fat makes up about 51 per cent of smooth peanut butter, more than twice its protein, which is why a 100-gram serving packs roughly 600 calories.
Q 16The classic children's snack 'ants on a log' is celery filled with peanut butter and dotted with what?
Raisins
Raisins are the ants. Girl Scout cookbooks printed the peanut-butter celery stick from 1946 with no raisins at all, and the name only turns up in print in 1959.
Q 17Which 1920s invention is credited with turning the peanut butter and jelly sandwich into a children's staple?
Sliced bread
Sliced bread, sold from 1928, let children assemble the sandwich themselves; its first printed recipe, in a 1901 Boston cooking magazine, had been a dainty tea sandwich for the well-off.
Q 18Which company sells the frozen crustless peanut butter and jelly sandwiches called Uncrustables?
Smucker's
Smucker's bought the idea from two Midwestern inventors, then spent years trying to use their patent on a crustless sandwich to stop a small Michigan grocer selling its own.
Q 19America's striped peanut-butter-and-jelly jar, sold since 1968, is named after which Southern word for peanut?
Goober
Goober is thought to come from nguba, a Central African word for peanut that arrived with enslaved people; rival names such as pindar and earthnut have all but died out.
Q 20Elvis Presley's 'Fool's Gold Loaf' was a hollowed-out loaf filled with peanut butter, jelly and a pound of what?
Bacon
Bacon: one night in 1976 Elvis flew his friends from Memphis to Denver on his private jet just to eat the loaves, then flew straight home again.
Hershey went on to supply all the chocolate coating for his cups, and Reese traded on the link by printing 'Made in Chocolate Town' on every pack.
Q 24Reese's peanut butter cups were first sold one at a time under what name, reflecting their price?
Penny Cups
Penny Cups cost one cent each; when wartime rationing bit in 1942, Reese dropped every other sweet he made and produced nothing but the cups.
Q 25Reese's Pieces became hugely popular after appearing in which 1982 film?
E.T.
E.T. is coaxed out of hiding with a trail of the sweets; the makers of M&M's had turned the film down, and sales of Reese's Pieces shot up within two weeks of its release.
Q 26Which company launched the peanut-shaped Nutter Butter cookie in 1969?
Nabisco
Nabisco's cookie became a blood-drive tradition in the southern United States: when the Red Cross there dropped it to save money in 1995, donors threatened to stop giving until it was reinstated.
Q 27Peter Pan peanut butter took its name in 1928 from a character created by which author?
J. M. Barrie
J. M. Barrie's hero named the first peanut butter to dominate nationwide; when its owners tried to cut their inventor's licence fee in 1932, he walked out and launched a rival that overtook it.
Q 28Which sugar substitute, found in some peanut butters, is dangerous for dogs?
Xylitol
Xylitol is harmless to people but triggers a rush of insulin in dogs, so their blood sugar can crash within an hour; vets say to check the label of anything sold as sugar-free.
Q 29Jif's factory in Lexington, Kentucky, is billed as what?
World's largest PB plant
World's largest PB plant: the Lexington factory turns out more peanut butter than any other, and it grew from a local brand called Big Top that Procter & Gamble bought in 1955 and reworked.
Q 30What prize did schoolboy Antonio Gentile win in 1916 for the drawing that became Mr. Peanut?
Five dollars
Five dollars was the prize, but the company's founder befriended the family and went on to pay Antonio's way through college and medical school.