Waterbury evening Democrat., 1908-09-28
POWDER ON PEANUTS
Used to Make the Coolers Look
 Clean and Pretty.
LONG AND CAREFUL TOILET.

Besides Being Powdered, the Nuts Ars
 Brushed and Polished and Sized Be-
 fore They Are Roasted--cooked at
 the Mill by Experts.
 There is not much to a peanut, to look at it. It grows on a farm and Is ready to eat after 1t has been roasted. A careless deduction would link up the farmer, the commission merchant, then the grocer or Michelangelo. That would be mighty careless de- auction, though. The first time lot of unroasted peanuts are encountered rub one on piece of dark cloth and observe the white mark it leaves. That is talcum powder. They powder pea nuts to make them look pretty, which is just why sister powders her face, and in that particular peanuts and girls are both alike.
 Any farmer can grow peanuts, but no farmer can sell them to the con- sumer. The peanut he grows is not fit to put on stand, at least not until it has been touched up. Look at the pea nuts on the next push cart and see how even they run as to size. They have all been sorted. Observe how clean they are and how white this lot is, how gray that lot is and how uni form all the different lots are. They have been sorted. -..
 When the peanut is grown it is gath cred and carried to miller, who puts 1t in a great bin and later carries 1t over to his mill, where he has con- trivance just chock full of brushes. These brushes get almost every feck of sand and dirt out of the peanuts, which is more than the farmer could have done if he had spent the summer trying. Then the brushed peanuts go on to another sort of mill. and by being tossed about they get their hulls polished, and while that is being done they are peppered with talcum powder, so that by the time they come out of this machine they are as white as they are to appear in public.
 But the peanut is not ready for mar ket yet It is alongside lot of larger or smaller ones, hurting the appear ance of the larger ones, while it does not enhance the value of the smaller ones. To even up matters the output of the talcum powder polishing ma chine is run out on to great canvas belt, which travels for fifty feet or more slowly. On either side of this belt are boys and girls. These sort the peanuts as they pass; this squad pick ing out the biggest, that squad taking the next largest, and so on down till the smallest are left. Shells that have dodged the powder rag are thrown back into the mill, and broken hulls are thrown away.
 That is about all for the peanut now, excepting the roasting. It has to be roasted. There is popular superstl- tion that the Italian vender roasts the peanuts in his little push cart All he does is keep them hot. They are roast ed at the mill, tons at time, cooked to nicety by experienced men, who have thermometers and all sorts of appliances to show them when a pea nut is done" This roasted product is the one that the Italian buys, and when he gets it he pops it into his lit- tie fake roaster and warns it over. It takes long time and lot of work and hosts of boys and girls to get the nickel's worth of hot roasted peanuts in the red and blue striped bag. but there is reason for 1t all, and the reason is that sack of even run small sized peanuts will find buyer quick CT than a sack of big and little ones all mixed up together. The stomach likes the eye to make good report, and the peanut commission merchant understands that shining shell, with filled with talcum, pleases the eyes, and he has no compunctions about the powder box, because he has found out that in roasting the heat drives off the surplus talcum. so that is why if one wants to find out for true about this trick of the trade It will be necessary to get hold of an un- roasted and not roasted peanut.
 By way of good measure 1t might be added that the shelled peanuts, gener- ally sold salted, have been run through a thrashing machine, which breaks the hull and blows it out of the way. Only Spanish shelr nuts can be so treated. The tougher hulls have to go to Signor Italiano.-Kansas City Journal.