Workers serve up grilled peanut butter sandwiches for Peanut Butter and Jelly Day at the Georgia Capitol. Ross Williams/Georgia Recorder
To celebrate National Peanut Month, the Georgia Peanut Commission kicked off Peanut Butter & Jelly Day at the Capitol on Tuesday, with lawmakers going nuts for grilled PB&J sandwiches and peanut candy courtesy of the Georgia Peanut Commission and other sponsors.
Even House Speaker Jon Burns took time to appreciate the humble Georgia staple.
“Peanuts are so important, obviously, to the economy of Georgia, to our farm economy and to our growers who’ve grown them for generations,” he said. “And I’m looking over here at the Atlanta Community Food Bank, how important it is from a nutritional standpoint to all Georgians. Whether you’re in urban Georgia, or rural Georgia or around the world, peanuts make a difference in people’s nutritional lives. But these guys do great work. They go out and fight the weather, every year this crowd sustains us all. I’m very proud of them and appreciate them being here today.”
According to commission chairman Joe Boddiford, PB&J day has been held at the Capitol annually for 25 years. Georgia has a deep-rooted history with peanuts, and they continue to be a staple crop used in many products today. Georgia is the national leader of peanut production at nearly 3 billion pounds in 2022, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
“Georgia grows over half the peanuts in the nation and that’s about 14 other states. We make good enough yields that we generally make a profit,” Boddiford said. “The number one thing that Georgia peanuts go into is peanut butter, they’re in a lot of candy bars. And whenever they crush them, they create peanut oil and that’s a very good cooking oil.
“Another one of their uses is in a fortified infant nutrition program, like Mana, saving a starving child’s life,” he said.
Mana Nutrition is a company based in Fitzgerald that produces nutrient-dense food using Georgia peanut butter for children overseas with severe malnutrition. The company recently made headlines when the Trump Administration terminated contracts with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which contracts with Mana, Feb. 26. The contracts were reinstated yesterday.
The University of Georgia has a dedicated “Peanut Team” as a part of its agricultural and environmental sciences. The team is composed of scientists who conduct agricultural research and provide environmental data to farmers.
“We work with the growers first-hand,” said Walter Scott Monfort, the Peanut Team’s lead scientist. “We have an agent in every county that works directly with the growers to produce peanuts. We also work with growers on problems, on anything that’s going on. We’re the non-biased source for the growers of the state when it comes to peanuts.”
Monfort said the team always faces difficulties but recent years have been especially tough.
“There’s always challenges every year, a lot of them environmental when it comes to weather. The weather in the last two years has caused us to lose a lot of quality and yield, but in most years we do really well,” he said “But we’re in a climate that grows very good crops, but it also grows very good pests. So we have to constantly work on trying to manage those pests.”
Sadly, not everyone can enjoy a Georgia peanut. Peanuts are one of the most common allergies, but Boddiford said peanut scientists are cracking the case.
“They work with pediatricians (in) early introduction to peanuts in the first six months of a child’s life, pretty well guarantees they don’t have an allergy to peanuts,” he said “There’s still some work going on a peanut vaccine or something that you can give a child or an adult and help them to either get over it or be at least less sensitive to it so it’s not the dangerous thing that it was.”
Reporter Ross Williams contributed to this article.
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