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This book is a popular history of peanut butter, the all-American comfort food that is found in the pantries of at least seventy-five percent of American kitchens. The book shows that, to a surprising extent, the story of peanut butter is the story of twentieth-century America. It details the wide variety of ways in which Americans enjoy peanut butter, shows just how much of the product is consumed each year and provides an explanation for why it is such a deeply ingrained staple of an American childhood. It draws on anecdotes and facts culled from interviews, research, travels in the peanut-growing regions of the South, personal stories and recipes. It covers the stories of Jif, Skippy, Peter Pan, the plight of black peanut farmers, the resurgence of natural or old-fashioned peanut butter, the reasons why Americans like peanut butter better than (almost) anyone else and the five ways in which today's product is different from the original. It also looks at the role of peanut butter in fighting Third World hunger and details the Salmonella outbreaks of 2007 and 2009, which threatened peanut butter's sacred place in the American cupboard.

This book maps the evolution of Western ideas about fat and fat people from the Middle Ages to the present, paying particular attention to the role of science, fashion, fitness crazes, and public health campaigns in shaping these views. While hefty bodies were once a sign of power, today those who struggle to lose weight are considered poor in character and weak in mind. The book traces the eventual equation of fatness with infirmity and the way we have come to define ourselves and others in terms of body type. The text begins with the medieval artists and intellectuals who treated heavy bodies as symbols of force and prosperity. It then follows the shift during the Renaissance and early modern period to courtly, medical, and religious codes that increasingly favored moderation and discouraged excess. Scientific advances in the eighteenth century also brought greater knowledge of food and the body’s processes, recasting fatness as the “relaxed” antithesis of health. The body-as-mechanism metaphor intensified in the early nineteenth century, with the chemistry revolution and heightened attention to food-as-fuel, which turned the body into a kind of furnace or engine. During this period, social attitudes toward fat became conflicted, with the bourgeois male belly operating as a sign of prestige but also as a symbol of greed and exploitation, while the overweight female was admired only if she was working class. The book concludes with the fitness and body-conscious movements of the twentieth century and the proliferation of personal confessions about obesity, which tied fat more closely to notions of personality, politics, taste, and class.