4 months ago
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Go figure: Food makers processed more peanuts over the past year than nearly any other time on record despite a national salmonella outbreak blamed for killing nine people and scaring consumers away from peanut products for months.
Peanut farmers who once feared $1 billion in losses are chalking up their good fortune to a bad economy that has more people reaching for peanut butter as a cheap lunch.
Agriculture Department numbers back up the theory. Peanuts processed for snacks -- items such as sandwich crackers that were heavily recalled during the outbreak -- were slightly down for the accounting year ending July 31. But peanuts used for peanut butter set an all-time record at 1.1 billion pounds, topping the previous year's total by 100 million pounds.
That was enough to make the year's overall peanut production the third-highest in history, missing the top mark set in 2005 by just a fraction of 1 percent, with nearly 2 billion pounds being processed.
