As recently as 15 years ago, peanut butter was nothing but wholesome. It was rubbed on Mr. Ed's teeth, slathered on sandwiches, tucked into lunch boxes across the country, and stuck with raisins to celery for “ants on a log” (a treat that always sounded more awesome than it tasted). Peanut butter was the protein-filled glue of childhood, and a pleasant, nostalgia-filled comfort food for adults. Dammit, peanut butter was American.

But the path of peanut butter has forked in recent years. On one side, there's the sharp rise in deadly peanut allergies among American children, transforming the PB&J from a classic lunchtime treat into a potential cause for anaphylactic shock if a child's playmate accidentally has a smudge of peanut butter left on his hands after lunch. Back in 1998, the debate was already raging when the New York Times reported that some private schools in the city had banned the butter, and other schools made sure to keep peanut butter and jelly sandwiches sequestered from other food. The message from parents of affected children was clear: Eat peanut butter, and risk killing my child.

On the other side of the fork, however, is a peanut butter renaissance. The market has grown fat with gourmet and organic peanut butters, and the Web site Amazing Clubs offers a Peanut Butter of the Month Club where subscribers get two specialty jars a month. With the recession in mind, Bon Appetit recently named peanut butter desserts one of the big food trends for the year. And in Africa, a fortified peanut butter known as Plumpy'nut has been saving children from malnutrition since 2005.

In short, when you talk about peanut butter, you are talking about life and death. The legume that giveth can also taketh away.

But all of this hubbub around peanut butter makes it very easy to forget that peanut butter is a very simple food. First invented in the late 1890s (and not by George Washington Carver — claiming he invented peanut butter is like saying Columbus “discovered” America), peanut butter was simply a mash of peanuts put through a meat grinder and marketed by a food producer named George A. Bayle Jr. And George didn't even invent the stuff — the actual inventor was an anonymous doctor who hoped that the butter could be used as a meat substitute for the toothless. His use of peanut butter was quickly followed by the Kellogg brothers, who used nut meals as part of their Adventist quest to create healthy vegetarian foods. Unfortunately, the Kelloggs’ peanut butter did not taste very good: They boiled their peanuts to blandness instead of roasting them. The stroke of genius finally came from a man named Edward Hasley, who sold peanut butter at the St. Louis World's Fair in 1899.

The addition of non-peanut ingredients to peanut butter — including sugar, salt, and stabilizers to keep the oil and butter from separating — came later. In the U.S., peanut butters are only required to consist of 90 percent peanuts. I didn't realize what a huge difference that other 10 percent could make until I recently compared fresh, homemade peanut butter to the regular jarred stuff. I compared heaping spoonfulls of the peanut butter I’d made with Peter Pan brand, and that's when I realized that while I like peanut butter, and I like peanuts, I had never expected peanut butter to taste like peanuts before. Despite my positive, nostalgic memories of peanut butter, I considered it a spread in a category all its own, something that was invented as a food glue. But homemade peanut butter, while being a little grainier and a little thicker, really tastes like peanuts. It brings a bright peanut flavor to sandwiches, cookies, and snacks.

And if taste isn't enough to make you start grinding up the little legumes, don't forget about commercial peanut butter's recent addition to the salmonella hall of fame. Peanut butter from the King Nut corporation has been cited as a possible link with the illness of more than 300 people and the death of six over the last few months.

So come on — join the peanut-butter renaissance. Heck, homemade peanut butter is so good, I might be ready to try ants on a log again.

Meg Favreau is a writer and comedian living in Philadelphia. She blogs at ihearyoulikestories.com.