OFF THE RECORD: I know there are a lot of nuts out there

Published 7:00 pm Wednesday, June 12, 2002

I had no idea there were so many nuts out there.

Not nuts of the human variety. NUT nuts, the type you eat/inhale. While scanning the shelves of my local grocery store for a pre-dinner snack, I was faced with a plethora of possibilities: cocktail peanuts, salted peanuts, dry roasted peanuts, honey-roasted peanuts.

I like peanuts, but the nuts that really call to me are cashews. In fact, the overwhelming urge to grab a mini-can of cashews is at times simply irresistible. So what is it about me and cashews?

I dunno, but I’m not alone. It turns out that the United States is the largest importer of cashew nuts from India, Brazil, Nigeria, Mozambique and other spots around the globe.

The downside of my fondness for cashews is they are high in price and fat. Coming in at 12.4 grams of fat per ounce and a whopping 145 calories, they’re not quite as fatty as filberts, hazelnuts and pecans. But when it comes to cashews, I don’t care about the numbers. I just love the taste of this kidney-shaped food.

Over the years, I’ve avoided devouring dozens of cashews at one sitting by purchasing a can of mixed nuts. My rationale is simple: If I buy a 10-ounce can of mixed nuts, I will pick out all the cashews, leaving the remains for my husband or the resident chickens. No doubt those losers left in a lump at the bottom of the can (bulky Brazil nuts and hideous hazelnuts) will eventually disappear.

As a connoisseur of cashew picking, I realize I’m not the only picker in town. Gather any group of partygoers around a mound of mixed nuts and you can count on the cashew count to be zero by evening’s end. Which made me wonder if anybody out there in the corporate nut world had statistics on this particularly picky picking practice. I decided to go Planters, the “Grandest Nut Company” of all.

After checking out their website, I learned that an Italian immigrant named Amedo Obici started Planters Nut & Chocolate Co. in 1896 in Wilkes-Barre, Penn. Twenty years later, Obici held a contest to create a logo for his nut company, and a 14-year-old won the prize. The young lad titled his simple sketch “Mr. Peanut,” and a commercial artist embellished the leggy legume with a top hat, monocle, cane and spats. Mr. Peanut first appeared in a 1918 Saturday Evening Post ad, and today the salty superstar is known around the world.

Like many companies that start small, Planters grew. It was eventually sold to Standard Brands, which merged with Nabisco, which is now a part of Kraft Foods. Got that? I decided to contact Kraft corporate headquarters in East Hanover, N.J., to find out more about my foolish fetish. Maybe the head guy was in.

Unfortunately, Mr. Peanut was not available, but a receptionist routed me to Elizabeth Wenner in corporate affairs. The conversation went something like this:

Ms. Frause: Hello, I’m Sue Frause, a weekly newspaper columnist, and wonder if you can give me some information about nuts — cashews in particular.

Ms. Wenner: Sure, specifically what are you looking for?

Ms. Frause: Well, I’m sure I’m one of millions of nut lovers who, when confronted with a choice of mixed nuts, always picks out the cashews. Do you have any data on this?

Ms. Wenner: Well, offhand I don’t have any of those numbers, in fact I don’t know if we have any information on that. But I’ll certainly see what I can find and get back to you. When do you need this?

Ms. Frause: My deadline is tomorrow, so if you could get back to me first thing Friday morning that would be great.

Ms. Wenner: Sure, no problem.

As promised, Ms. Wenner did get back to me. And as much as she had hoped to give me an answer on what percentage of Americans pick through a pile of nuts to get to the cashews, she had no hard data.

So that got me thinking — maybe I should apply for a grant to find out how many nutty Americans pick the cashews out of a bowl of mixed nuts. Well, stupider things have been studied in our country. In the 1996 book “Goofy Government Grants and Wacky Waste,” author Sheryl Lindsell-Roberts shares many a tale of silly spending, including these two doozies:

n The U.S. government spent $10,000 on a study to determine the effect of naval communications on the potency of a bull.

n The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism invested $102,000 to discover if sunfish that drink tequila are more aggressive than sunfish that drink gin.

I don’t think my goofy grant idea is so nutty after all; I may just pursue it. In the meantime, here’s some advice from Mr. Peanut that merits repeating: “Relax! Go Nuts!”

And remember to save me the cashews.

Sue Frause can be reached by e-mail at skfrause@whidbey.com.