Phutatorius

The way I see it, there are two kinds of people in this world — the good Americans who understand and appreciate the peanut and its many derivative products (oil, brittle, butter, &c.) and the bastard communists who are tearing down the Lovely Legume's good name with their made-up allergies.

When I was a young pup, there was none of the throat-closing, seizing-up, and carting-off that you hear about today. The kids brought PB&J to school for lunch every day, and they liked it. It certainly wasn't the case that children were dropping off every afternoon of some mysterious yet-to-be-identified illness. So what happened in the meantime to set off this crisis?

Here's one theory: way back in the early days of television there used to be an institution called the "Peanut Gallery". As my link will tell you, the Peanut Gallery was the studio audience for the Howdy Doody show. It is the informed belief of medical linguists at the University of Iowa that the cancellation of that program rendered the term Peanut Gallery largely useless, so triggering a migration of the capital G deeper into the word gallery. Much like the Great Vowel Shift that marked the evolution of Middle English into the modern vernacular, this migration occurred imperceptibly over time. It took, in fact, more than thirty years before the g, now of necessity lower case, lodged itself permanently between the letters r and y and gave life to the term Peanut Allergy in the early 1990s.

While I find this view imaginative and compelling, I refuse to give it my credit, because it legitimizes a phenomenon that is at best trumped-up and at worst psychosomatic. Nut allergies, I'll grant you. They've been around for years, my father-in-law has one, and it's no joke. But the peanut, ladies and gentlemen, is not a nut. Nonetheless, America still buys into this nonsense. Anti-peanut militias have successfully lobbied to withdraw the peanut from our school cafeterias. And they've taken their fight to the skies: where once I could expect a foil-wrapped bag of honey roasted lovelies in transit, the airlines now foist pretzel snacks on me that taste like shellacked sawdust. What's next? "Buy me some wasabi peas and Cracker Jacks" during the seventh-inning stretch? Don't rule it out, people: the message these peanut-haters seem to be sending is that there is no longer a place in America for the peanut. George Washington Carver, that lovable fanatic, is no doubt rolling in his grave. Use #519 for a peanut: off the brat/make it look like an accident.

The peanut lobby needs to fight back, I tell you. This battle will not be won with charming hat-and-cane animatronics and a Never-Neverland attitude. They need a slogan, a legume's equivalent of "The Other White Meat" or "It's What's For Dinner."

For my part, I propose "For crying out loud, have a Peanut already — it won't kill you."