Peanuts regain place in pantries

By Jeffry Scott

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

ARLINGTON — It’s sunny and warm and dry and hard to imagine a more perfect early September day for peanuts in this part of the world where as the Arachis hypogaea goes so goes just about everything else — the economy, the jobs, the pride, the reputation, an entire way of agricultural life.

“Puuuuuurty pea-nuts,” a farm hand says to Mike Newberry, who smiles as he surveys fields flush with the dark green, knee-high foliage of peanut plants somebody from the city might mistake for arugula in the rough. “Yeah,” says Newberry, “they are.”

Just nine months ago a national salmonella outbreak tied to the Peanut Corporation of America processing plant in nearby Blakely was blamed for the deaths of nine people nationwide and the illness of more than 700. The outbreak loosed such a plague of bad press on the state peanut industry and threw such a scare into consumers, the head of the Georgia Peanut Commission, Don Koehler predicted it would cost peanut growers, processors, and the sellers of peanut products $1 billion in losses.

Today, a whole other story. Koehler says the loss may amount to just a fourth of that, as farmers, such as Newberry, report another encouraging sign: peanut shellers two weeks ago raised what they are paying for this year’s crop, which will be harvested in late September, from $375 to $400 a ton.

“I don’t think we’ve come all the way back,” said Newberry, 52, a fifth- generation farmer with a plot of about 1,100 acres in southwest Georgia, about 200 miles from Atlanta. “Last year they sold for $500 a ton. But it’s a sign that confidence has been restored. At $400 a ton I can make a decent profit.”

Retail sales of peanut products reflect that the nation’s peanut eaters have pretty much blacked out the traumatic memories of January and February when sales of grocery store peanut butter — which were never linked to the outbreak — plunged almost 25 percent, and every day the FDA added dozens of products to its recall list, which reached over 3,200.

It was so bad in mid-February Georgia’s poison peanuts were bigger news than the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, according to The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, prompting Blakely mayor Ric Hall to call it “The Great Salmonella Media Event.”

Today, grocery store peanut butter sales — which dipped to $67.5 million for the month of February, have almost fully recovered — to about $78 million during a four-week period in July and August, according to Chicago-based retail sales tracking company, Information Resources.

Kellogg’s, one of the hardest hit by the recall, which cost the company between $65-70 million, reported in early September that weekly sales of its Keebler and Austin Peanut Butter sandwich crackers now match or exceed sales before the outbreak.

The National Peanut Board said, according to its survey, consumer confidence in peanut butter started rebounding last may when 70 percent of people who had quit eating peanut butter during the height of the scare said they had resumed eating it.

The turnabout is hard to figure — unless you understand how deeply rooted peanuts are in the American psyche, says Joseph Priester, a consumer psychologist and marketing professor at the University of Southern California.

“In our culture, peanut butter holds a special place of convenience, perceived nutrition, and more importantly reminiscence,” he says. “People feel attached to peanut butter. It is, and has been, part of their lives, from being given peanut butter sandwiches by their mothers as children to sandwiches to bring with them on picnics as adults.”

It’s not shocking that people went back to eating it, he says. More revealing is that, during the worst of the scare, sales of peanut butter only dropped 25 percent — “and people were dying from eating this product” he says.

If it were spinach, he says, it would have been a different story. “Spinach suffered a similar, relatively specifically caused, outbreak of salmonella, and that consumption fell much more than 25 percent, and has not fully rebounded ever since,” he says.

Priester and Koehler and others credit the FDA and the CDC for sending the consistent message to customers that the outbreak was tied to peanut paste, butter and meal produced by PCA’s plants in Blakely and Texas, which have been shut down (the company is in bankruptcy), and not linked Georgia peanut farmers or peanuts and store peanut butter.

That message eventually got through to customers such as Pam Turner, an Atlanta mother who quit buying Peter Pan peanut butter in January when the national spotlight was on Blakely and the Georgia peanut industry “because I wasn’t sure and I didn’t want to take the chance.”

In June, she went back to buying about two jars a month. “My husband and daughter and I just love PBJ sandwiches,” she says. “I was in the store and just kind of reached up and grabbed a jar.”

Still, it won’t be a perfect recovery for the state’s peanut farmers.

Even without the salmonella scare, they produced such a bumper crop in 2008 it will take through January 2010 for processors to finish roasting, shelling, and distributing peanuts harvested back in September 2008, says Dr. John P. Beasley, Jr., a peanut expert with the Crop and Soil Sciences Department of the University of Georgia.

“It’s supply and demand,” he says, “and right now we’ve got too much supply.”

In about ten days Newberry will start pulling peanuts out of the ground with a digger shaker — at a rate of about 50 acres a day — and leave the peanuts lying on top of the soil in the sun for a few days to dry out before they go to the shelling plant.

“I know I don’t sound like a farmer,” he says. “But the last thing I want right now is rain.”