The Groundnut That Crossed Oceans: West African Foodways, George Washington Carver, and What Peanut Butter Really Is

The peanut (Arachis hypogaea) is indigenous to South America. The Inca were cultivating it along the Pacific coast of Peru and Bolivia at least 7,500 years ago. Portuguese and Spanish traders brought it to West Africa in the 16th century as part of the Columbian Exchange — and what happened next is one of the most remarkable stories in agricultural history. In the sandy soils of West Africa, the groundnut found a second home so deep it became impossible to imagine the continent’s cuisine without it. Nigeria is today one of the world’s largest groundnut producers. Ghana’s nkatenkwan (groundnut soup) is ceremonial. Senegal’s mafé (groundnut stew) is foundational. Ethiopia, Mozambique, Uganda — the groundnut wove itself into food cultures across the continent because it did what ancestral food systems require: it sustained people, restored soil, and required nothing industrial to be useful.

The transatlantic slave trade moved this knowledge again. African people — and their agricultural knowledge, including groundnut cultivation — arrived in the American South. Peanuts became a staple crop in the South long before they became “peanut butter,” and the people who knew best how to grow and use them were the African people who had carried that knowledge across the Atlantic.

George Washington Carver and the Science of Liberation

George Washington Carver was born into slavery in Diamond Grove, Missouri, around 1864. After emancipation, he worked his way through school, eventually directing agriculture at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama — a historically Black institution surrounded by Black farmers who had been sharecropped into poverty after Reconstruction.

Those farmers had a problem: cotton monoculture had stripped their soil of nitrogen. They needed a crop that would restore the soil, feed their families, and generate income. Carver’s research was not abstract science. It was community-directed problem-solving. He developed over 300 products from the peanut — cooking oils, soaps, inks, flour, cosmetics, dyes — to build economic infrastructure for Black farmers systematically excluded from financial and agricultural support systems. Carver never patented his discoveries. He believed knowledge belonged to the communities that needed it.

Peanut butter as we know it in the United States is inseparable from that history. When we talk about what peanut butter does for the body, we are also talking about what it represents: a plant that crossed oceans, sustained communities, and became the subject of one Black man’s life work in service of people who had nothing but their land and their knowledge.

What Peanut Butter Actually Contains

At its simplest, peanut butter is ground roasted peanuts, sometimes with salt. This is dense nutrition:

Plant-based protein: 7–8 grams per two tablespoons. For communities with limited access to expensive animal proteins, this matters significantly — the same reasoning behind the plant-based milks, from oat to tigernut, that African traditions were already making long before the wellness industry noticed. Studies show that people who regularly include peanut butter in their diets are less likely to develop heart disease or type 2 diabetes than those who rarely eat nuts.

Healthy fats: Primarily monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats that support cardiovascular health. The fat in peanut butter also supports satiety — meaning it sustains you through a meal, which matters when food access is uneven.

Micronutrients: Magnesium, phosphorus, niacin, folate, vitamin E, and biotin — not as supplements, but as food. These are the nutrients our ancestors got from the plants they cultivated and knew intimately. The groundnut was nutritional infrastructure long before it appeared in a Smucker’s jar.

Antioxidants and cellular support: The fatty acids in peanut butter support cellular growth, skin and hair health, immune response, and reproductive function — whole-body nourishment from a single, simple food.

What to Look For

The ancestral version of this food is simple: peanuts, maybe salt. Modern industrial versions add hydrogenated oils — to prevent separation and extend shelf life — and sugar. Partially or fully hydrogenated oils increase LDL cholesterol and cardiovascular risk, which is the opposite of what peanuts in their natural state provide. Oils, especially fully or partially hydrogenated oils, should not be in your peanut butter — they are added for shelf stability but can have negative impacts on blood cholesterol and triglyceride levels.

Two-ingredient peanut butter — peanuts and salt — is what our ancestors would recognize. It separates in the jar because it is not stabilized with industrial fats. Stir it. That is the correct form. The oil on top is not a sign of poor quality. It is a sign that the food has not been processed away from what it is.

Peanut butter in the United States is a product of Indigenous South American agriculture, West African foodways, and the scientific labor of a Black man who gave his knowledge to communities that needed it. When you choose the simple version — just peanuts — you are making a choice that resonates across that entire history. What we eat is never only about nutrients. It is about what we are in relationship with. —MM

Related Reading

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• ‣ Burdock Root in African, Hoodoo, and Indigenous Healing Traditions
• ‣ Mirror Neurons and Communal Healing
• ‣ Reparations and Healing: A Public Health Argument

Michele Mitchell is the Founder, President & CEO of Ubuntu Village Inc., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit rooted in East Harlem, New York, with programs in Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria. A writer, advocate, and community strategist working at the intersection of ancestral wisdom, public health, and community power, Michele leads Ubuntu Village’s work to center communities as the protagonists of their own healing. She writes from the conviction that science and spirit are complementary, that healing is relational, and that community is the medicine.