FIELD

Nothing Goes In

The peanut process is subtractive, and the proof is the layer of oil in the jar. There is a simple way to judge how heavily a process intervenes in a food. Ask what gets added. For peanut, the answer is nothing. I want to walk through the whole process, because

In 1987, in Florida, a peanut quietly stopped making an enzyme by accident.

Nobody engineered it. The plant broke on its own, and the break is the reason peanut can be put in the same sentence as olive oil. Peanut converts oleic acid into linoleic acid using a desaturase encoded by two homeologous genes, ahFAD2A and ahFAD2B. In the line catalogued as F435,