Billy: Hello, it’s Billy. Before we get started with the show, we owe a huge thank you to everyone who has supported us so far on Patreon. It’s already making a dent on our weekly expenses, and it’s been really cool meeting so many of you. We can’t thank you enough. If you want to hear more about what we’re doing on Patreon, hang around at the end of the show or go to Patreon.com/underunderstood.

Adrianne: This is Underunderstood.

Adrianne: Hi, everyone.

John: Hi Adrianne.

Adrianne: I just want to acknowledge upfront that we talked about this two years ago in October of 2018. And I had accidentally recorded the pitch on my computer’s onboard mic instead of through my good mic and so now we’re going to do it again.

John: I don’t remember it to begin with.

Adrianne: I think we’ve all forgotten about it. I’d forgotten most of it.

But anyway, this is a story about big government and mixed nuts.

Billy: Oh, wow. It’s going to be the biggest story of your career.

Adrianne: This is going to be a hot scoop. So… do any of you ever buy mixed nuts?

John: I don’t think I do.

Billy: Yeah, of course. Great finger food.

Adrianne: What are you going for when you buy mixed nuts? What do you makes a good mixed nuts purchase?

Billy: Um, honestly I’ve never really thought about it, but I feel like if there was a high ratio of cashews, I would, I would feel good about my purchase.

Adrianne: You like the cashews. Okay.

John: That’s interesting.

Billy: I just think the cashews are like a more premium nut.

Regina: But would you pay more for something if it had more cashews?

Billy: I’m just saying if it’s all peanuts, it’s like, barely mixed.

Adrianne: Anyway, you’re wrong. Cashews are not premium.

Billy: Oh.

Adrianne: They are more premium than peanuts.

Billy: Okay. Well, I’m a simple man

Adrianne: Okay.  I’ll remember that.

Billy: Everyday American.

Adrianne: I’ll put that in my Billy’s favorite things file that I keep on my desktop.

Billy: Great.

Adrianne: This exploration into mixed nuts is another idea from my wonderful husband. And he brought it to me, or it came up because he was looking for a specific brand of mixed nuts that he thought were really good.

And somehow came across this fun fact. Did any of you know that the FDA actually regulates the proportions of nuts in mixed nuts?

Billy: No. It’s incredible though. It’s like a…

Regina: How do they even determine that? Yeah.

Adrianne: How would you know?? But anyway, they’ve been regulated in the U S since the 1970s, and they’re regulated by the FDA, the Food and Drug Administration, which is serious business. And prior to the early seventies, you could call anything mixed nuts. But after that, there were some pretty strict rules that you had to do follow if you wanted to sell anybody a thing called mixed nuts.

First of all, mixed nuts have to have at least four different nut varieties. And each variety must be more than 2% of the total weight, but not more than 80% of the total weight. And crucially, if any one nut type is more than 50% of the total mix, the label has to declare that this mixed nuts mixture contains up to 60% or up to 70% or up to 80% of that nut.

Billy: 60% of weight, correct?

Adrianne: By weight, yeah.

Billy: So you could put a bunch of, bunch of fluffy nuts in there…

John: This is what I’m… yeah, so like the density of these nuts is what matters here?

Adrianne: Yes.

Billy: Right, like an almond, you could put like a single almond in there and probably get away with it.

Adrianne: Well, if it’s 2% or more.

Billy: As we’ve established, I’m a cashew aficionado. And part of their appeal is that they are… they’re like sort of light and airy. Right?

Adrianne: Right. Well, by the same token, you couldn’t really say that it needs to be 50% by number of individual nuts, because some nuts are much larger than others. You know, a Brazil nut is like five peanuts.

John: What determines whether something is a nut?

Billy: Does the FDA regulate the word nut?

Adrianne: Listen, John, they thought of that.

John: Okay…

Adrianne: In this regulation, which I’ll just tell you what section of the federal regulations this is coming from: Title 21 – Food and Drugs – chapter one – Food and Drug Administration – Department of Health and Human Services – sub chapter B – food for human consumption – part 164 – tree nut and peanut products – subpart B – requirements for specific standardized tree nut and peanut products – section 164.110 – mixed nuts. We’re talking about almonds, black walnuts, Brazil nuts, cashews, English walnuts, parentheses, alternatively “walnuts.” Filberts, pecans, and other suitable kinds of tree nuts. As well as peanuts of the Spanish, Valencia, Virginia, or other similar varieties or any combination of two or more such varieties.

John: Tree nut and peanut. So they’re doing a special carve out for the peanut, which is not actually a nut, but that’s the only non-nut-nut that can be in a bag of mixed nuts.

Adrianne: And then the standard after defining how many by weight of each type have to be in the mix, it goes on to talk about the labeling and it gets really precise about wording and even font size. Quote, if the percentage of a single tree nut ingredient or the total peanut content by weight of the finished food exceeds 50%, but not 60%, the statement “Contains up to 60% of X” shall immediately follow the name mixed nuts and shall appear on the same background, be of the same color or in the case of multicolors, in the color showing distinct contrast with the background and be in letters not less than one half the height of the largest letter in the words mixed nuts.

Billy: Wow. They’re really cutting down on shenanigans with these mixed nuts.

Adrianne: Right. Well, I mean, I’m just imagining, like, the super tiny print with the declaration that it’s like, actually it contains up to 80% peanuts in that tiny, small font. That’s not doing anyone any good. It’s gotta be big and contrasty.

Billy: I really have a beautiful picture in my mind of the person who drafted all of this language.

Adrianne: So people have been making YouTube videos where they count the peanuts and figure out how many are peanuts.

Man’s voice 1: What’s going on YouTube? Today, I wanted to do a test on the Planter’s mixed nuts, and I really just wanted to see if I was getting my money’s worth.

Man’s voice 2: It says less than 50% peanuts, but I couldn’t find a straight answer as to whether that’s true or not.

Man’s voice 3: What I decided to do is buy more of these and break it down… See if it is really less than 50% peanuts.

Adrianne: And then Andy Rooney did one of his Andy Rooney bits in like 1994 where he’s like, “Mixed nuts, I counted all the mixed nuts… there’s a mix.”

Andy Rooney: In the Planters can, there were 35 cashews, 43 almonds, twenty-five filberts or hazelnuts, seven Brazil nuts, and the pecans were in such little pieces I couldn’t count them.

Adrianne: No one has actually dug into why we have this standard, why this ever caught the attention of the FDA, and that’s what I would like to get the answer to.

John: So why this standard exists.

Adrianne: Why does it exist? How did it make it all the way to the top? Who cares enough about this that it’s a whole entire law. I mean, not a whole entire law, but a whole entire subsection.

John: I do think it’s kind of funny that like the FDA is like scrambling doing like ad hoc, temporary approvals of vital testing for a worldwide pandemic and you’re like, “um, about these nuts…”

Regina: I love that.

Billy: What’s the deal with these nuts?

John: Coming up. Adrianne goes nuts looking for answers.

Adrianne: How’s everybody doing?

Regina: Oh I think I just got a red pepper flake.

Adrianne: So not so well.

Billy: I’m doing all right.

Regina: I’m good now.

Adrianne: Okay, good. Because I have some answers about mixed nuts.

Billy: Yes.

Adrianne: Standard of identity is what we’re talking about here with this story. Standards of identity are how the FDA was regulating food. The agency will describe in excruciating detail what a food product must contain, how it must be proportioned, and sometimes how it must be manufactured.

So like, what is mixed nuts or what is cheese and what is pasteurized cheese spread? What is mozzarella? Or what is ketchup or if a jam doesn’t contain any fruit, can you still call it a jam? Stuff like that?

John: Wait, is mozzarella not a cheese?

Adrianne: It is a subcategory of cheese, but it is distinct from other types of cheese and it has its own definition.

John: Thank God. I thought you were telling me mozzarella was not considered a cheese by the FDA.

Adrianne: No, I’m sorry for giving you that wrong impression.

Billy: But you said not only what it is, but how it’s made, right. How it’s manufactured.

Adrianne: Yeah. So like for example, to keep going with cheese, because cheese is an absolutely enormous section. Here’s the process for Monterey Jack cheese. One or more of the dairy ingredients specified in paragraph B1 of this section is subjected to the action of a lactic acid producing bacterial culture.

One or more of the clotting enzymes specified in paragraph B2 of this section is added to set the dairy ingredients in a semi-solid mass. The mass is so cut, stirred and heated with continued stirring as to promote and regulate the separation of whey and curd. Part of the whey is drained off and water or salt brine may be added.

The curd is drained and placed in a muslin or sheeting cloth formed into a ball and pressed or the curd is placed in a cheese hoop and pressed. Later, the cloth bandage is removed and the cheese may be covered with a suitable coating, one or more of the other optional ingredients specified in paragraph B3 of the section, may be added during the procedure.

John: Adrianne can we do a spin off podcast that’s just you reading these?

Adrianne: So there was a lot of change happening in the food industry in the fifties and sixties and food was being sold in packages. Instead of being sold in bulk, there were a lot of changes that happened after world war II new chemicals, white bread was being enriched with vitamins for the first time. And this was happening to all kinds of foods, but peanut butter really captured the public’s attention.

Male voice: We keep telling you that because Skippy is made by a new, exclusive, patented process it does not taste like peanut butter. It does taste exactly like peanuts, Plump selected fresh roasted peanuts. Skippy is the only peanut butter with the stale makers removed.

Adrianne: Food companies were adding hydrogenated oils and other things to the peanut butter to make it like super smooth and shelf stable and spreadable. And so the FDA decides to propose that peanut butter has to be 95% peanuts and the food industry is outraged. They say. You’re getting in the way of innovation and they come back with a counter proposal that peanut butter has to be 87% peanuts.

And then this huge fight happens. There are all these public hearings and it goes almost all the way to the Supreme Court.

Billy: My understanding was that a peanut sat on a railroad track and its heart was all aflutter. And then along came a choo choo train, choo choo peanut butter.

Adrianne: Right. That, is what the standard ended up being.

Billy: Okay.

Adrianne: So in the end, the FDA said, okay, peanut butter has to be 90% peanuts and the industry agreed, but the whole process was so horrible that it made the FDA start to rethink this whole standard of identity thing and focus more on having manufacturers disclose ingredients, but it took a long time to get there.

And in the meantime, mixed nuts comes up for a standard of identity. I spoke to two historians, John Swann who currently works in the FDA historian’s office.

John Swann: What I know about mixed nuts, was you know, growing up and always, you know, hearing, my father or siblings complain that, who ate all the cashews in the mixed nuts or something like that.

Billy: The cashews!

Adrianne: And I also spoke to Suzanne Junod who used to work in the FDA historian’s office.

Suzanne Junod: I’m the peanut person, which is how, um, in the food standards I’m the person.

Adrianne: They told me the FDA has actually pursued dozens of cases involving mixed nuts. Starting back with its authority under the Pure Food and Drugs Act, which was 1906.

Suzanne Junod: There was a case very early on that claimed that it was mislabeled fancy mixed nuts. And it was, again, those peanuts are the least valuable ingredients and the courts were used to, um, to act on it.

Adrianne: So there was a case where someone labeled their nuts, fancy, and then someone else said these nuts aren’t really fancy.

Suzanne Junod: Yeah.

Adrianne: Okay. So in 1913, the U.S Secretary of Agriculture directs the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of West Virginia to seize 25 bags of fancy mixed nuts. And this case is actually called U.S. vs 25 bags of nuts.

Regina: No it isn’t.

Adrianne: It is, that is how the FDA named these cases. Because the FDA, they would find the food and then they would be like, all right, we’re suing this food. If you want to defend it, come pick it up.

Regina: What

John: This is so good.

Adrianne: Yeah. So there’s a bunch of these there’s like U.S vs. 30 bags of nuts. U.S. vs 64 cases of nuts.

Regina: Oh, my God.

Adrianne: in the case of U.S. vs. 25 bags of nuts, the allegation was that there was adulteration and misbranding. So the adulteration was because some of the nuts were rotten moldy wormy, and then the misbranding was alleged because “the term fancy mixed nuts appearing on the label was false and misleading because the nuts were not fancy mixed nuts, but were of a grade inferior thereto.”

Regina: I just feel like fancy is arbitrary.

Adrianne: Well, the court agreed with you. The government brought in these experts from the nut industry to testify that these were not fancy mixed nuts, but the judge said basically, He wasn’t having it because he said there’s no government standard. So you can’t have these people come in who are basically competitors of this company that the case was brought against, and just say what is a fancy mixed nut when there is no government standard.

Billy: Wait, is this why Planters made their mascot look like an old timey business mogul?

Adrianne: To suggest fanciness? Yeah, that’s funny.

Billy: I’m just saying.

Adrianne: So the judge wrote, “the trouble lies in the utter failure of the department to establish what percentage of bad nuts shall constitute the standard of fancy mixed nuts, the percentage of bad nuts, or of small nuts, or of the various sort of nuts contained in the mixture.

They have failed to do that and they can’t put that responsibility on the trade. I don’t think that meaning was ever intended to be given to the Food and Drugs act.” And the judge throws out the claim of misbranding.

Regina: Can’t win em all.

Adrianne: There are a bunch of cases like this, but they mostly involve quality and safety issues.So there were rancid nuts, wormy nuts, one case where the manufacturer used bitter almonds instead of regular almonds, which are apparently unsafe to consume.

Billy: it’s like Russian roulette nuts.

Adrianne: Yeah, exactly.

Regina: Ha

John Swann: There wasone interesting case from the 1930s involving several hundred packages of mixed nuts from the Bordeaux Products of New Jersey. In this case, the FDA found a problem with the containers that these were shipped in they, they had false bottoms. And that’s where the charge was. They were slack filled.

Adrianne: That is a big thing, slack filling.

Billy: What does that mean?

Adrianne: Not filled all the way. It looks like more nuts than you’re getting. So I’m getting the impression of just lots of mixed nuts fraud and a lot of food fraud in general. And at some point it became clear that the 1906 Pure Food and Drugs act, isn’t cutting it.

Suzanne Junod: By the Depression, it became really obvious that there was so many problems in the food industry, especially with labeling content.

Adrianne: Like one example that I saw a lot was that they were making jam. That was just artificial sugar and red dye.

Suzanne Junod: One of them, my favorite, had like fake seeds in it to make it look like strawberry jam.

Adrianne: So then we get the 1938 federal Food Drug and Cosmetic Act. And this is what established standards of identity, quality and fill. And the FDA is really thinking about how to empower consumers through labeling. And it’s having these fights over everything from what is cherry pie to what is shrimp breading.

And the FDA has just gotten to this point where it sort of has to define every single food. John Swann told me that the FDA first proposed the mixed nuts standard in 1968.

John Swann: Under the proposed rule for mixed nuts, the agency, identified rules for three types of commodities. And those were mixed nuts, mixed nuts without, peanuts and finally peanuts with mixed nuts. And they also developed a rule for the fill of a container of these products.

Adrianne: So they proposed this first version of the standard, which was very similar to the final rule, but slightly more strict. And the FDA proposed this rule and asked for public comment and it got back a bunch of comments from nut industry entities, like the Peanut and Nut Salters Association as well as members of Congress and consumers.

Billy: I’m sorry, the Nut Salters Association?

Regina: Why am I not a member of that?

Billy: Wow.

Adrianne: And the members of the public are first of all, confused as to why there are three identities for mixed nuts, and also very concerned about the ratio of various nuts. So I checked with a nut wholesaler and almonds were the cheapest at $4.67, a pound. Cashews $5.40 a pound. Hazelnuts, $6.60 a pound. Pecans, the moneymaker, $7.67 a pound and  peanuts, $1.41 a pound.

Suzanne Junod: The basics of the thing are that the cheapest nuts are peanuts. So it’s really a consumer protection issue as much as anything else. Cashews I think are the next least expensive or whatever. There may be, there’s some others, but the most expensive are the pecans.

Adrianne: So she, she also thought of cashews as being the, the cheap nut.

Billy: Whatever.

Adrianne: But anyway, peanuts are indisputably the cheapest option. They cost a third of the next cheapest option, almonds. And they aren’t even tree nuts. They’re legumes. They’re in the same family as beans and peas.

Suzanne Junod: People that love peanuts would probably rather have the ones that have more peanuts, but also the people that want more peanuts are probably likely to buy a can of peanuts Um so anyway, that’s, you know, that’s the basic idea behind regulates and mixed nuts is just, you know, how do you protect the consumer from being, not even cheated, cause there’s nothing wrong with peanuts. It’s just that, when you get mixed nuts, the consumer expects it not to be 75% peanuts.

Billy: Such a political answer. She doesn’t want to come down hard on peanuts.

Adrianne: I think she might be one of those people who likes peanuts. I may have said earlier that FDA was defining all the foods, but that’s not really right. Of course they weren’t defining all of the foods. Really they were defining foods where there was some controversy or some disagreement, which at a time when food was changing so much turned out to be this huge list, but neither of the historians could point to a specific reason why the FDA decided to look at mixed nuts.

Suzanne did mention Consumer Reports, which is published by Consumers Union. And that magazine put out a big expose on mixed nuts in 1964. The Consumer Reports investigation is quoted in the Wikipedia article for mixed nuts, but it’s not online anywhere. Luckily, I happened to know someone who works at Consumer Reports, my friend, Nicholas De Leon.

I figured he could just walk over their archives and pull it off the shelf.

Nicholas: Uh, calling them archives is perhaps a little fancy there. It’s kind of like separate volumes kind of strewn throughout the building. But this particular book I found somewhere in the magazine wing of the building, someone just happened to have it. And they were like, why do you need this magazine from 50 years ago?

It was like, I don’t actually know, but we’ll see.

Adrianne: I didn’t realize there was such a quest.

Nicholas: It wasn’t that hard, but it was just, I had to go to this woman and disturb her and say, hello, I need to grab a random magazine, please.

Adrianne: Okay. So you were able to track down this issue from 1964 and it was the Christmas buying guide, basically, which seems to be like sorta like the September issue of Vogue for Consumer Reports, maybe.

Nicholas: Yeah. It’s an important part of the year for Consumer Reports.

Adrianne: Got it. And can you just kind of describe to me what this issue from 1964 looked like?

Nicholas: The cover was delightful. Volume 29, January to November 1964. There’s a picture of Santa Claus on the cover. It is red. It is delightful. It’s like a big gift. Also in this issue, we looked at coffee makers, portable radios, electric toys, tape recorders, electric knives, eight millimeter movie cameras, scotch whiskeys, mixed nuts, and museum gifts.

So the headline of the story is, it is in fact “mixed nuts.” The subhead is, “peanuts made up three fourths of the cans contents in some of the brands.” Yeah. This is like serious business. You know, you could say it’s a silly article on like mixed nuts, like who cares type of thing. Oh no, the Consumers Union cares, people care, and they take it deathly seriously. Okay. So the first graph is, “anyone who plans to buy ready, mixed nuts for his holiday parties had better be sure that the guests are particularly fond of peanuts or cashews. That is the one piece of reliable, practical advice that emerged from Consumer Union’s examination of the contents of 124 cans of mixed nuts, four samples each of 31 brands bought in 17 cities across the country.” So that was the opening graph. And you could tell that this is, again, this is real.

Adrianne: Yeah. It’s it’s serious.

Nicholas: This is real. This is real life. Okay. The second graph is, “at the instigation of a number of disgruntled nut eaters among the subscribers Consumers Union started counting nuts with the idea that it’s your for report on brands of canned mixed nuts might be welcome around Christmas, but the studies, the results read all too much like a cautionary tale showing what could happen in a market where a product can be offered without benefit of a definition or standard of identity.

Nut by nut. The averages of all the brands investigated by Consumers Union are presented in the table on page 543, but chances are, if you read on you’ll end up wondering whether you hadn’t better mix your own man. Again, this is, this is like why I love Consumer Reports.

Adrianne: And then they have a photo here too, a black and white photo.

Nicholas: Yes. Yeah, there’s a black and white photo of it appears to be two cans of mixed nuts. And then the concept of the cans kind of broken up by type of nut. And you can see in the picture, some piles of nuts are much bigger than other piles of nuts.

Adrianne: Right. The, one of the cans has just one Brazil nut.

Nicholas: Literally one Brazil nut in this big can of allegedly, ostensibly mixed nuts. Yes.

Adrianne: So my guess is that Consumer Reports kind of stirred the pot with this article. And then the government officials started to get interested. And the head of the FDA at the time was getting more interested in expanding regulations and getting more aggressive with the FDA’s authority. And then that same year he’s talking to a newspaper reporter, and he used mixed nuts as an example of consumer fraud saying, “you might find quote a can of mixed nuts that contained 80% peanuts although the picture on the label showed no peanuts.”

Billy: I mean, it is kind of a nice, like low hanging fruit thing for them to be able to fix and then be able to be like, see, “we’re on your side, if, if it wasn’t for us, you’d be buying just peanuts every time you bought mixed nuts.” And then that kind of, I would think instills more public trust in them doing bigger, more important things.

Adrianne: Sure. And it does seem like this is something people were complaining about. Like this might’ve been actual pressure from consumers. There was this woman,  Bess MyersonGgrant, she was a beauty pageant contestant turned consumer advocate, who was the first commissioner of the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs.

And she told the New York Times in 1969, three years after the Consumer Reports piece, that quote, “we’ve been receiving complaints, that it takes a squirrel’s instinct and salty fingers to come up with a fair sized assortment of real mixed nuts.”

Billy: is really incredible to think. I mean, I’m sure that there were much more important things that at that the general public was just paying no mind to at all, but it, it’s hard to not feel nostalgic about like a time where this was on a high list of concerns for an everyday American, but like how, how many nuts, nut varieties, they were getting in there mixed nuts.

John: I’m kind of fascinated that like, it was worth it to like stick a single one of a nut in one of these to like, there’s this kind of like old timey charm to this kind of scam where it’s so blatant. Like, I feel like this is a very like classic American scammer. We’ll get them on a technicality.

Adrianne: Right. The nut company. And you’re like, there was only one almond in my mixed nuts. And they’re like, well, was there one almond? You’re like, yeah. And they’re like mixed nuts.

So consumers are making noise about this. So this was Suzanne’s theory about Consumer Reports, but then I came across this article from the FDA in-house magazine, which is called Consumer., which is great by the way. And this is a 1985 article. It’s a PDF that was uploaded by Google. I don’t know how I missed it the first time either it just got added or I just didn’t have the right keywords to search for, but anyway, it’s titled, “Mixing up the nuts.” I think this actually has the real answer.

And when I sent it to the historians, they agreed that this probably is the real story. Suzanne told me that this magazine’s articles have to be cleared by FDA and it is considered authoritative and she’s a historian. So.

John: It’s actually a multipler.

Regina: Yeah it adds up.

Adrianne: It stacks. Quote, “in years gone by when consumers opened some brands of packaged, mixed nuts, searching for their favorite almond or filbert was like searching for a needle in a haystack. What was in the can or bag was mostly peanuts and the more expensive tree nuts were few and far between. Consumers are mostly patient people, but eventually the nut industry began receiving complaints.”

“Their beef was, where’s the nuts? And they didn’t mean peanuts. The nut industry became a little worried about some of its members practices and came to FDA asking that the agency issue standards for mixed nuts.”

Billy: Wow.

Regina: So they told on each other.

Adrianne: “As a result of this industry-agency cooperation, refreshing after the protracted peanut butter battle, FDA published a standard for mixed nuts that said packages should contain no more than 80% and no less than 2% of any one nut. And that the mixture must contain at least four kinds of tree nuts with or without peanuts all this to help consumers from getting mixed up when they buy nuts.”

Regina: Oh, my God.

Billy: That does make a lot more sense because it just seemed odd to me that, of all the things this would bubble up and be something that the FDA tackled. It seemed like they had a lot on their hands at the time, but if nut makers are ratting each other out for bad practices and, and come together, cause they’re concerned it’s hurting the reputation as a whole, then that makes sense.

Adrianne: I have a little coda. I went to the store and like a cliche bought a can of mixed nuts. And this one happened to be from the Massachusetts company krasdale and Sam and I sat at the kitchen table and counted up all the nuts. And we found 56% peanuts by weight. And I thought, Oh man, I’ve got them.

Billy: Call the cops.

Adrianne: They should have a label that says may contain up to 60% peanuts because they exceeded the 50% standard.

And I contacted the company and I got a call back from a spokesperson named Jordan Clark. And he asked that I please not use his voice. But he pointed out that the standard is measured by looking at the average of 24 containers. And the company acknowledges that there is quote some variability on a can to can basis.

So my case against Krasdale was a bust. And then he offered to send me some cans of mixed nuts, which I graciously declined out of journalistic integrity.

John: Thanks for listening! Underunderstood is Billy Disney, Regina Dellea, Adrianne Jeffries, and me, John Lagomarsino.

Regina: This story was produced by me, Regina Dellea, reported by Adrianne Jeffries, and mixed and edited by John Lagomarsino.

Adrianne: Special thanks to Angie Boyce, the author of “When does it stop being peanut butter?” who helped me with the history of food standards for this story, and Nicholas De Leon, who went spelunking in the non-archived archives of Consumer Reports.

Billy: Underunderstood is produced entirely independently. It’s just the four of us who make the show and because of that we now have a Patreon where you can support us at Patreon.com/underunderstood. If you pledge $5 a month you will get access to Overunderstood, which is our bonus podcast, previously called Overstood for the first episode episode until we realized there is already a podcast named that, so shoutout to them, we’re sorry we stole your name for one episode. It has a new name now so let’s just forget this.

Regina: You will also get access to our Discord where we talk about interesting things like Trader Joe’s snacks and other snacks and mostly snacks.

John: If you have a burning question that the internet can’t answer, drop us a line at hello@underunderstood.com. If you like the show, tell a friend, rate us on Apple Podcasts, share the thing around.

Billy: Thank you so much for listening and we will have another episode of Underunderstood for you next week.