George Washington Carver invented peanut butter.

The story you've heard

It is one of the most repeated facts in American classrooms: George Washington Carver, the great Black scientist at Tuskegee, invented peanut butter. It appears on posters, in quizzes and on lunchbox trivia cards.

The intention behind it is good. Carver deserves to be remembered. But peanut butter was being made long before he started work on peanuts, and pinning the jar on him actually shrinks what he achieved. Both the National Peanut Board and science historians say the same thing plainly: he did not invent it.

Where peanut butter really came from

Peanuts come from South America, and people there were grinding roasted peanuts into a paste centuries ago. The Incas and the Aztecs are both credited with making peanut pastes long before anyone thought of a sandwich.

The first patent came from Canada. In 1884, Marcellus Gilmore Edson, a chemist in Montreal, patented a method of milling roasted peanuts between heated surfaces into a paste with the consistency of butter, lard or ointment. He imagined it being mixed with sugar to make sweets, and there is no evidence he sold it as a butter.

In the following decade, doctors took an interest. In St Louis, the physician Ambrose Straub is said to have made a high-protein peanut paste for patients who had lost their teeth, and a nut butter linked to his friend George Bayle was offered at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. In Battle Creek, Michigan, John Harvey Kellogg patented a nut-butter process in the mid-1890s and promoted it to his health-sanatorium patients, including people who could hardly chew. Sources differ on whether Kellogg's patent was 1895 or 1896. In 1903 Straub patented a peanut-butter machine.

The smooth, shelf-stable spread most people know came later still. In 1922 Joseph Rosefield patented a process that stopped the oil separating, which made peanut butter a supermarket product.

What Carver actually did

George Washington Carver was born into slavery in Missouri, probably in the early-to-mid 1860s; even the exact year is uncertain. He was raised on the farm of Moses Carver, whose surname he took. He studied briefly at Simpson College, then at Iowa State Agricultural College, where he earned a bachelor's degree in 1894 and a master's in 1896.

That same year, Booker T. Washington recruited him to the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, where he stayed for the rest of his life. He arrived in a region exhausted by cotton. Planting the same crop year after year had stripped the soil of nutrients, and poor farmers, many of them Black families working small plots, were trapped by falling yields.

Carver's answer was crop rotation. Peanuts, sweet potatoes and other legumes put nitrogen back into the soil, so alternating them with cotton could restore worn-out land without expensive fertiliser. But farmers would only grow peanuts if they could use or sell them, so Carver set out to show what the crop could do.

In 1916 Tuskegee published his bulletin How to Grow the Peanut and 105 Ways of Preparing It for Human Consumption, a practical guide that mixed growing advice with recipes. Over his career he is credited with more than 300 peanut products and uses, from milk and ink to cosmetics. In 1921 he spoke to a committee of the United States Congress on behalf of the peanut industry, and from then on he was known as the Peanut Man.

On your plate today

When Carver arrived at Tuskegee in 1896, the peanut was not even recognised as a major American crop. By 1940 it was one of the six leading crops in the United States and the second cash crop in the South after cotton. That change is his real legacy. He did it by working with some of the poorest farmers in Alabama, showing them that science could make their land and their lives better, and by refusing to treat the humble peanut as a crop only fit for animals.

So the next time you spread peanut butter on toast, thank the Andean cooks for the idea, Edson for the patent, and Carver for the fields the peanuts grew in.

Timeline

1. Centuries agoCooks in South America grind roasted peanuts into paste.
2. 1884Marcellus Gilmore Edson of Montreal patents a peanut paste.
3. 1890sDoctors, including John Harvey Kellogg, promote nut butters as protein-rich food for patients.
4. 1896George Washington Carver joins the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.
5. 1916Carver publishes How to Grow the Peanut and 105 Ways of Preparing It for Human Consumption.
6. 1921Carver speaks before a Congressional committee and becomes known as the Peanut Man.
7. 1922Joseph Rosefield patents a process that keeps peanut butter from separating.