Maybe you’ve eaten a few peanuts and seen elephants at the circus or in a movie pick up peanuts with their trunks to eat them. You may have even learned in school that George Washington Carver made many, many foods and products from peanuts. But do you know what connection China has to peanuts?
Well, China produces more peanuts than any other country in the whole world. It’s true! In fact, according to the World Atlas, China produces approximately 8 percent of the world’s peanuts, which is almost twice as many peanuts as the second peanut production runner-up, India.
The United States does love its peanuts, though. According to the National Peanut Board, it’s the third-largest producer of peanuts in the world. The U.S. had two peanut farmers to serve as presidents. Thanks, Thomas Jefferson and Jimmy Carter! And it has six cities named after these peanuts! But alas, because China produces the most peanuts, it still wears the peanut crown.
Not everyone calls the small legumes peanuts. Peanuts are also known as groundnuts, which makes sense because they don’t grow on trees like a lot of other nuts — they grow under the ground like potatoes or carrots!
The National Peanut Board says on its website that in one year the world, as a whole, produces about 29 million metric tons of peanuts. It also explains that for every 12-ounce jar of peanut butter you have in your pantry, it took approximately 540 peanuts to make it! That’s a lot of peanuts!
