Why does peanut butter taste so good?

 

    This morning I had my usual breakfast: a whole grapefruit and a Bays cinnamon and raisin English muffin with a tablespoon of Smucker’s Natural Peanut Butter.
     I really like Smucker’s peanut butter. It tastes great, far better than the natural peanut butter I remember from the 1970s, a bland beige paste found at places like the Sherwyn’s health food shop on Diversey.
     And I wondered: is this a trick of memory? Could natural peanut butter have gotten better? And if so, how? They don’t add anything. Just peanuts.
     One way to find out.
     “I love this stuff.” I wrote to Smucker’s, asking to talk to a brand manager. “We would discuss, first, why the product is so delicious.”
     That was Monday, Dec. 6.
     The response: nothing.
     I tried again the following Monday.
     “It seems to me, that if Smucker’s can’t respond to this, what is it you respond to?” I asked.
     And the next Monday.
     “It’s been two weeks now. I’m beginning to lose hope.”
     On the one month anniversary, I wrote to company CEO Mark Smucker, explaining what I had in mind.
     He put me in touch with what seemed like a crisis PR firm in New York. We had some lovely conversations, but the question remained unanswered. They were working on it.
     As January went by, I reached out to my alma mater. Why is Smucker’s so bad at this? Is this a common corporate problem, or perhaps the result of red state anti-media paranoia? The company is based in Ohio.
     “Without knowing anything about Smucker’s, that surprises me,” said Jonathan Kopulsky, a senior lecturer on business marketing strategy at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management. “The marketers’ job is to tell the story of their brand. You’d think, this may be an opportunity. You’d think, ‘Hey, a reporter from a major daily—why wouldn’t we want to use that to tell our story?’ That surprise me. I can’t think of a possible explanation why they wouldn’t use that.”
     The best we could imagine was reflexive secretiveness.
     “In a hypercompetitive world, what you regard as mundane operational things may be viewed as tipping their hand to competitors,” suggested Kopulsky.
     I had another theory: could it be that newspapers are so diminished that we aren’t worth the time to communicate with?
     “The relevance of newspapers as an advertising medium is dramatically down,” said Gerry Chiaro, who teaches brand communications at Medill. “I can build up my social media following to hundreds of thousands, even millions. Sometimes it can go viral. I’d rather spend my time on that, if I can find influencers to speak to my community.”

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Whole Paycheck

     Whole Foods was never a good fit for Englewood. Too expensive, too pretentious, though credit to them for trying to bring Italian lemonade and bulk grains to a low income urban food desert. But Whole Foods closing down there after six year years, announced this week, was foreordained.
     I live in whatever the opposite of a food desert is—a food cornucopia, I suppose. Sunset and Jewel—several Jewels—and Mariano's and Aldi and Costco and even Fresh Farms, that great Russian emporium in Wheeling, with fantastic slavic bread and Eastern European cookies, everything immaculate and wonderful. I'm sure I'm leaving a few out. 
     The one place I never go to is Whole Foods because, well, I explained it in 2005:

SAVE THE EARTH

     Too bad there aren't more hungry, homeless people in the northwest suburbs, because they could graze themselves full on 12-grain and seed bread, cider-roasted salmon with fruit chutney and other exotic free tastes at the Whole Foods in Deerfield. When I stopped by I had just had lunch and wasn't even hungry, yet still found myself nibbling cubes of Fratelli Pinna Brigante cheese and chunks of gourmet brownies. A far cry from the sizzling slices of kielbasa that smock-wrapped, beehive-hairdoed ladies used to prepare in electric fry pans and hand out stuck on fuzzy toothpicks at the A & P.

     I couldn't read descriptions in Whole Foods of the coddled apples and happy chickens fed only natural grains without thinking of the Romans, and their candied lark's tongues. Organic food is decadent, even worse than the excesses of the past because it is disguised as virtue. The whole world is eating beans grown in the sludge of old bauxite mines and gnawing meat that has hung on hooks in the market for three days, while we're paying $10 a pound for maple mustard roasted turkey from birds raised on Mozart.
     We're not paying for the food, really, we're paying for the packaging, and its implication that our lettuce was grown by pueblos and delivered by ox cart. I stood in gaping wonder at "American Flatbread," an "all-natural pizza baked in a primitive wood-fired earthen oven." At first I focused on "earthen" as the marvel. "I tried pizza from metal ovens but it tasted so . . . technological."
     But then I came to savor "primitive." Not any old earthen oven, mind you, not one of those fancy Southwestern stucco domes with a door and everything. No, our oven is a rough mound of dirt and we shove the pizzas in a hole and they sit serenely baking amongst the burning yew wood, wood specially grown for us in renewable Brazilian forests by our own joyful peons. And we, we are not charmless suburbanites yapping on our cell phones as we roar up to Whole Foods in monstrous vehicles that burn more money in gas each month than most people in the world earn in a year. No, we are gentle, rainforest folk, crouching under the lush green canopies of our self-regard, using our fingers to eat organic groats from wide bowls, groats gently washed with spring water, a bargain at $7.99 a pound.

                  —published in the Sun-Times, Nov. 28, 2005

Wilmette Notes: Best Worst

From "Spring Awakening" on stage at the Porchlight Theater until June 2.

 

    One cost of COVID's hidden costs is all the theater we've missed. A loss I barely considered until I read today's report from Wilmette Bureau Chief Caren Jeskey:

By Caren Jeskey

     Germany, 1890. The usual societal dilemma, feed the rich or feed the poor, was at hand. Chancellor Leo von Caprivi was not popular with the elite, as he sought to also address laborers' rights. A sheltered girl, a student of a cruelly authoritarian institution of higher learning, had just turned 14. She begged her mother to tell her the truth about where babies come from. Her sister had just had a second child. The girl, Wendla, could wait no longer. Her mother relented and sat down in a sturdy high backed wooden chair. Wendla hurried to sit on the floor at her mother’s feet, laid her head in her mother’s lap and looked off into the distance, waiting. Mother’s face was panic stricken. She had no idea what to say. She finally covered the girl’s face with her apron — oh the shame of it! — and launched in.
     “For a woman to bear a child, she must… in her own personal way, she must… love her husband. Love him, as she can love only him. Only him… she must love— with her whole… heart. There. Now you know everything.”  

     And that’s all she got.
     I watched this scene unfold in a front row seat on opening night at the Porchlight Theatre this past Thursday. I was the fortunate recipient of a +1 ticket from a dear friend who's more important than I. When Wendla stood up and sang to us, desperately trying to figure out what the heck her mother had just said, time stood still in that way that only live theater can do. Being in close proximity to humans emoting strongly, rather than looking at pixelated actors on a screen, is an intimate affair. More so now. I felt exposed and awkward about eye contact, seeing as we were so close. I felt vulnerable and did not stifle sobs when a young character committed suicide. It was all so tragically relevant.
     Some of you know that I am describing "Spring Awakening," Frank Wedekind’s first major play, that he wrote in Germany with a backdrop of social unrest and mores based on repression, control and delusion, rather than any semblance of the realities of human behavior and sexuality. Welcome to 2022 America.
     Now that Wendla understood she was to love a man in her own special way, and her budding curiosity and hormones longed to know more, she soon thereafter had her first tryst with a young man from her school (that was of course segregated by assumed gender). She had no idea what was about to happen, but his kisses and expert cajoling led her to become more and more relaxed, and then submit. Earlier we heard him speak to a friend about the art of charming a woman from the point of saying no to saying yes. You can call that what you will.
     When repression reigns supreme, terrible things happen.
     Wendla did not know that what she and the boy had done is how babies are made, since no one ever told her. She was forced to have an abortion, and died. As we creep back to the dark ages around the right to choose, the play was apropos. Humans have always, and apparently will always, fail at nurturing others on an epically large level.
     The good news today is that on a much smaller level, we can find ourselves at a quality performance with expert musicianship and a well trained and talented cast on a cool Spring night. You and I will likely not be forced to an untimely death with a dangerous medical procedure to avoid shame. I feel ever so grateful to have been born with opportunity.
     I delightfully found myself sitting next to an actor and Jeff Awards judge who pointed out that the room was full of writers. So this is where the cool kids hang out. I like it and I will be back for more.

     “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.” — Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens

     It is, has always been, and perhaps will always be.

‘I don’t give up’

     Most graduates from the City Colleges of Chicago don’t participate in the traditional cap-and-gown ceremony. Only 1,424 students from the seven colleges — Harold Washington, Harry S. Truman, Kennedy-King, Olive-Harvey, Malcolm X, Richard J. Daley and Wilbur Wright — will walk across the stage at Wintrust Arena this Sunday for a handshake and a diploma cover. More than 2,000 graduates will pass on the opportunity.
     Why?
     Jobs. Family obligations. Too busy.
     But Maria G. Delgado will be there.
     “It’s important for me to go to the ceremony because it brings closure,” she said. “Closing a chapter but beginning a new one. Closing a cycle.”

Maria Delgado

     A long cycle: 28 years. Delgado started taking classes at Wright College in 1994 when she was 19.
     Now she is 47.
     “I grew up in Wicker Park, then moved to Humboldt Park,” she said. “It was a very bad area back then, lots of shooting, lots of people dying. I’m surprised that we made it out.”
     She was born in Mexico’s most violent city, Zamora, Michoacán. Her mother was 14. Her parents, Trinidad and Virginia Montejano, fled to the United States when Delgado was a child. They stressed the importance of education, and are another reason she is going to commencement on Sunday.
     “It honors my parents,” she said. “A way to thank them for everything they did, a way of paying them back.”
     Which some might say she’s already done. After Delgado began college, her parents grew ill. She tried taking classes while being their caregiver, but it became too much. Her mom needed a pacemaker; her dad, a liver transplant. Delgado started having panic attacks.
     “I just couldn’t do it anymore,” she said. “Once they told me she had three- to six-month life expectancy, I couldn’t retain anything. I withdrew from my classes.”
     Her mother died in 2008; her father died in 2015. But by then Delgado had her own difficulties. She struggled with mental illness.

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Flashback 1987: Satisfying sweet toothes — Brach & Sons works hard to meet demand

Photo for the Sun-Times by Rich Hein.

   Talking about candy at Ferrara made me think about this visit to Brach, 35 years ago, when the sprawling factory was going 24 hours a day on the West Side. The writing is a little clunky; I was 26, and still a freelancer. But of enough historical interest to merit sharing. I should point out that Rich Hein, who took the photos—in black and white!—is now the Sun-Times photo editor, and I appreciate him giving permission for me to reproduce them.  

     Valentine's Day is still more than two weeks away, but at E. J. Brach & Sons, the holiday already has passed.
     Despite the red, white and pink mints, small candy valentines and foil-wrapped chocolate hearts displayed in covered glass jars in the lobby of the Brach Kinzie Avenue plant, the Valentine's candy has almost all been made and is on the way to stores. Inside the plant, it's Easter.
     Thousands of "speckled eggs" — oversized malted milk balls, covered in chocolate and a white candy coating — sit in huge bins, waiting to be boxed. On a long table, women wearing hairnets and white gloves arrange soft white strips of marshmallow fluff, preparing them for the transformation into marshmallow rabbits.
     Candy is an important part of our lives — the sweet reward that soothes a woe or heightens a pleasure; timeless, in the sense that the candy enjoyed in youth is available, unchanged, in old age.
     A candy factory is an odd mix of the fantastic and the practical. Candy, in glorious overabundance, flows in rivers, collects in pools and lakes, cascades out of machines. But to satisfy the world's sweet tooth, a candy factory must be modern and efficient. There are no elves at Brach. Room after room of chuffing, whining machines spit out tens of thousands of candies. To the newcomer, the churning machinery is staggering.
     "When I first got here, I couldn't figure out where all this candy was going," said Phyllis Osmocki, a 33-year Brach employee. "And this was on just one (conveyor) belt — there were all the other belts, and all the other departments. Who eats all this?"  

Photo by Rich Hein

   According to statistics, just about everybody. The per capita consumption of chocolate is more than 11 pounds per person, or over $4.8 billion worth of chocolate a year.
     And chocolate is only one type of candy made by Brach. The Kinzie Avenue plant can simultaneously produce 11 different types of candy — hard candies, chocolate-coated nuts, decorated mints. The largest manufacturer of candy worldwide, Brach produces more than 1 million pounds of candy a day, creating some 200 distinct varieties.
     To produce all this candy, Brach employs 4,100 people, from managers and salesmen to production people. The plant runs 24 hours a day, Sunday night through Friday night. At any time, a considerable number of production lines are not running, but are being cleaned, or refitted to run a different sort of candy.
   Eddie Stokes operates a $6.5 million Baker Perkins machine that turns out 2,000 pounds of hard candy an hour. "My job function is starting the batch up, cooking it to 300 degrees, pulling the water moisture out of the candy to give it the clear look," he said. "There are six Baker Perkins machines at Brach, and I know how to operate each and every one of them."

Photo by Rich Hein

   The machines are monstrous, perhaps 200 feet long, taking the candy from a steaming cauldron of hot syrup to the cooled, wrapped, finished product. Along the route are a maze of gauges and hissing pneumatic lines, and pumping control rods and twirling wheels, all carefully monitored by the operators.
     While most of the candy is made by machines, there is one type of candy that demands direct human involvement. Despite advanced technology, no machine has been made that can place a pretty red heart in the center of a hard mint, so that type of decorated candy is made by hand, on one floor of the plant.
     There are no white-gloved women here, but burly men in hairnets who handle the corn syrup candy, referred to as "glass" because of its transparency. It is roughly the color and consistency of petroleum jelly when it comes out of the huge, loud pressure cookers at one side of the room, which infuse the air with the smell of hot peppermint.
     The large discs of candy — some weighing up to 100 pounds — are carried to cooling tables. When they are cool enough to handle, but still warm, they are worked by hand. It is tough, strenuous work, and the workers press hard on the discs with metal bars, kneading and folding the glass, working in various flavorings and colorings. The discs — some now brightly colored in hot pinks, deep roses and electric greens — are tugged into long shapes and placed on a machine resembling a giant taffy puller, which further kneads and works them.

Photo by Rich Hein

     The long strips of various colors are formed into a pattern — in this case a rose — and the tube of candy, called a "rope," is fed into a machine that reduces it in size, with plenty of human pushing and coaxing, spinning the rope thinner and thinner. It goes in a foot thick, and comes out about an inch in diameter. As the rope gets smaller, the design gets proportionally smaller. At the end, when the rope is sliced in segments, each quarter-sized mint encases a perfect rose.
     In addition to production, Brach runs a research and development lab, experimenting with new candies and adjusting recipes of old favorites.
     Thus, in the corporate offices, which otherwise would look like any large company, small plastic bags of candy corn, malted milk balls or jelly beans, can be found clipped to memos, waiting for attention atop "in" baskets. There also is a faint smell, sometimes like marshmallows, sometimes like mints, permeating the corporate offices.
     Explained Robert Allen, vice president of operations at Brach: "Just because you've been making a candy for 50 years doesn't mean you can't improve it."

         —originally published in the Sun-Times, Jan. 29, 1987

Sweet and multi-sensorial

Greg Guidotti at Ferrara headquarters in the Old Post Office. 

     For all the decades I’ve been driving through the Old Post Office, particularly during the five years I lived in Oak Park, I’d never actually been inside the sprawling deco complex, not beyond a quick 30-second dash into the lobby to mail my taxes.
     That changed Friday, and I found myself sitting in the sixth floor funhouse splendor of the Ferrara Candy Company headquarters. That itself is an amazing development. There is no way I could ever get inside, say, Wrigley headquarters. Not through any imaginable process that didn’t involve me swimming ashore at Goose Island, shedding my wetsuit, scaling a wall, knocking out a guard, then shimmying through the ventilation system.
     But Ferrara invited me. And as soon as I settled in a conference room, I could see why. They’ve invented a new type of candy.
     “The hot product right now is Nerds Gummy Clusters,” said Greg Guidotti, chief marketing officer at Ferrara, standing before a conference table piled with bags of candy. “You can open it. Give it a look, and try it.”
     He didn’t have to ask twice. I tore open a small bag, suppressed my first thought — “They kinda look like candy coronavirus spheres” — as indecorous, and popped one in my mouth.
     “Essentially it’s classic Nerds wrapped around a gummy deposit,” said Guidotti.
     I wish I could buy bags of Guidotti’s enthusiasm — a seasoned marketing pro, who spent time at Kraft and sold Duracell in Asia — to munch throughout the day. Or better yet, send packages to the PR sorts that I generally have to try to wheedle information from, who narrow their gaze and worry, in a chill voice that sounds like it’s coming from the woman in “American Gothic” — “You want more information about our product? Why would you want that?” It’s such an unexpected joy, to meet somebody who is actually good at what he does.

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Freedom to express any lie you want

     We’re at a point in America’s slide toward the bottom where everything has become a code, often signaling the exact opposite of what is being claimed.
     Those who talk about “right to life” of course are really referring to their own imagined right to impose their fundamentalist religion and moral strictures, through law, on people who don’t share them. The true goal being to somehow drag our country back toward the Eden they fancy existed in the 1950s, when women who had sex for reasons other than procreation could be branded as sluts who must bear the fruit of their folly, or risk their lives with back alley butchers and end up in the sepsis ward of Cook County Hospital. We’re well on our way.
     Or when Donald Trump talks about “voter fraud” he is trying to facilitate a fraud of his own, pushing to undercut fair elections while promoting unfair contests skewed in his favor, since those who might vote against him are limited by a variety of disingenuous roadblocks and barriers.
     “Free speech” is now the equivalent of being free from the consequences of your malicious, deceptive, and toxic ramblings, the First Amendment a shield to hide behind. Thus Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, on Monday reached a deal to buy Twitter, the dynamic social media platform, with the express intention of removing the guardrails that led to the ejection of those who, for instance, traffic in anti-vaccine fantasy, or engage in the kind of bullying and harassment Musk relishes.
     It’s like the worst nuisance on the beach buying a private swim club so he can freely kick sand in weaklings’ faces.

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