“You got a cute vest-pocket Mazda
Which you can make both slow and faster”

The rhyme tells us how “Mazda” was pronounced back then – different from the car of today.

“Joseph Rosefield was an entrepreneur in the food business who developed a process that revolutionized peanut butter forever. Peanut butter had been around for years, but the problem was that the peanut oil would separate from the peanuts and the whole thing would spoil. That would happen fairly quickly, making the product somewhat of a luxury. In 1922, Rosefield came up with the idea to hydrogenate the peanut oil. This keep the oil from separating from the peanuts, and viola, suddenly you had a peanut butter that could stay fresh for MONTHS (heck, probably even a year or so).”

First, the actual process is “partial hydrogenation.” Complete hydrogenation (or “full hydrogenation”) does not produce the harmful trans fats that partial hydrogenation produces. Full hydrogenation produces saturated fats rather than trans fats. While saturated fats are not healthy, trans fats are far worse. Additionally, to fully hydrogenate the oil in peanut butter (or any oil) would result in a product that could not be spread on bread or whatever. Full hydrogenation results in a solid that would be more like the hardness of butter when it comes out of the refrigerator.

The partial hydrogenation process creates a product that is semi-hard (or semi-soft)–like margarine that comes out of the refrigerator (or like partially hydrogenated peanut butter, of course). It creates a product that can easily be spooned out and spread on things.

In baked goods, it creates a product that does not go rancid as quickly as it would if the baked good was made with normal oil that had not gone through the partial hydrogenation process.

Additionally, while Rosefield may have been the first to partially hydrogenate peanut oil for use in peanut butter, he was not “develop the process.” The hydrogenation was developed by a French chemist (Nobel Prize winner Paul Sabatier) in the 1890s. He did not use it on oils, however.

Along came German chemist Wilhelm Normann in the first decade of the 20th century who began to use the hydrogenation process to create solid oils–though I have no idea why.

Finally, in 1909, Procter and Gamble acquire the US rights to Normann’s process and began to partially hydrogenate vegetable oil to create Crisco as a substitute for lard. The process then began to be used to make margarine (the butter substitute) that had previously been made by taking clarified vegetable oil and removing the liquid through a pressurized process and then allowing it to solidify (making it semi-hard). The partial hydrogenation process was cheaper than the liquid removal process and it could be used on non-clarified vegetable oil.

Thus, while Rosefield may have been the first to use the process to create a peanut butter that did not separate, he was not the developer of the process.

Additionally, the reason for creating partially hydrogenated peanut butter was not due to peanut butter going rancid (though it certainly did if kept in a pantry). Back then people did what people nowadays do if they buy “natural peanut butter”–they stir the separated oil back into the solid peanut butter until the peanut butter achieves the semi-soft consistency that is spreadable. They then refrigerate the blended peanut butter–which keeps the oil from separating but still makes the peanut butter spreadable. Refrigerating this “natural peanut butter” also prevents it from going rancid.

The partial hydrogenation of peanut butter was to create a product that did not need to be refrigerated and that did not have to be stirred to blend the oil back into the solid peanut paste.

Great story over all.

The Skippy character was vaguely familiar to me, but I had never heard anything vaguely reminiscent of this whole back story ! Growing up, like most kids, I had a good amount of peanut butter sandwiches, and rarely eat it now. Back in the day so many of these creators really got shafted. Good luck to Ms. Tibbetts with her battle. Truth is stranger than fiction.

This would make a great documentary.

Bluto / Brutus – I thought they changed to Bluto because it sounded less harsh and barbaric than Brutus. Brian taught me something again.

BTW Brian, congrats on your book. I always thought these columns should be collected as a book.

I’ve been reading the current Popeye dailies on-line, and I *think* they mentioned in one strip that Bluto and Brutus are twin brothers, but the reason you only see one is because the other is always in prison.

So there’s another Comic Legend to track down.

Weird thing about the dailies and Sundays. The dailies are by one artist or team, and the Sundays by someone else. You can see the difference in the art style.

Clayton Emery

I’m surprised they didn’t have the character called Brutus B. Bluto and be done with it.

Ok, maybe not interesting……

For any readers living in the U.S. of A., this story about a new law prohibiting the sale or distribution of childrens’ books printed before 1985 (like the Uncle Piggily series mentioned above) means that it’s now going to be almost impossible to find them if you don’t already own them. And what a crime that is!

Great, now I’m hungry for peanut butter, despite it being possibly deadly!

It does seem that if another peanut butter product and a bus line could appropriate a trademarked name back in the day then the courts would have a hard time saying Rosefield could not without opening up a host of other legal challenges. And I’d be interested in knowing how much was “a little settlement”. With due respect to the families involved, it seems to me you shouldn’t accept a settlement and then keep pursuing a claim.

Jackie Coogan (not Jackie Cooper) was the child star whose parents stole his money and inspired the creation of laws protecting child stars. You might know him as Uncle Fester from the Addams Family.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coogan_Law

Now we know better–Hydrogenation increases chances of heart attacks, strokes, & other related medical conditions.