peanut butter

South America (peanut domesticated in Bolivia/Paraguay ~7600 years ago); ground peanut pastes existed across multiple cultures

South America, Africa via Portuguese slave trade, African cuisines adopted it, returned to Americas as African foodway, industrialized in US

The peanut's Atlantic circuit is one of the most complete examples of how the Columbian Exchange worked: out of South America, into Africa via Portuguese slave ships, absorbed into West and Central African cooking, carried back to the Americas in the hands of enslaved people, then industrialized in the United States. George Washington Carver's peanut research was explicitly tied to Black economic self-sufficiency in the post-Reconstruction South. This means the peanut was never just a crop. It was a political project.