Why I actually make my own peanut butter

A society should not confuse household ingenuity with economic wellbeing. People are inventive while under pressure - stretching flour and turning a packet of peanuts into several weeks of sandwiches, but the pressure isn't harmless.

I make my own peanut butter, which sounds like something you should say while living an admirably wholesome life in a beautifully organised kitchen sparkling with labelled glass jars.

The truth is that I make peanut butter because peanut butter is expensive.

I buy a packet of raw peanuts, roast them in the oven and put them in a blender with a little salt and oil. Within a few minutes, I have a large jar of peanut butter at a fraction of the price of the branded version.

Once I realised this, I began looking at other products in the same way. Mayonnaise is eggs, oil, lemon juice and a blender. Bread is flour, yeast, water and time. Pasta is flour and eggs - a little water if it's dry. Pizza is bread dough with something on top. These foods aren't difficult to make, it's just that we've grown used to buying them after somebody else has made and transported them for us.

I didn't begin making peanut butter out of self-sufficiency whimsy, but because every visit to the till resulted in shell-shock.

Lower inflation doesn't mean cheap food

The latest national figures seem to contradict my experience - at first. According to Statistics South Africa, annual inflation for food and non-alcoholic drinks fell to 0.9% in July 2026, its lowest level in more than 16 years. Maize meal, macaroni and white bread all became slightly cheaper during the month, while the annual prices of several beef products declined.

That's good news, but it doesn't mean food has suddenly become affordable.

Inflation measures how quickly prices are changing. A lower inflation rate means prices are rising more slowly, or that some have declined from where they were a year earlier. It doesn't return prices to what they were several years ago. The high prices already built into a household’s grocery bill stay there.

The figures also average together many different products. While cereal and meat inflation softened in July, prices continued to rise in categories like vegetables, fruit, dairy products, eggs, oils and fats. The experience differs from one town to another and from one trolley to the next.

The Pietermaritzburg Economic Justice and Dignity Group calculated that its basket of 44 basic household foods cost an average of R5 479.80 in August. That was slightly lower than in July, but still R99.18 more expensive than the same basket in August 2025. The researchers found that peanut butter and brown bread had both increased by 2% during August. Potatoes rose by 7%, butternut by 8% and beef by 5%.

Even a small increase impacts many families because food is competing with electricity, transport, school costs, and debt. There may be no room in the budget to absorb another R10 here and R20 there.

Convenience has become a luxury

Making food at home is not automatically cheaper. There are the input costs of making bread rolls, for example. People travelling far to work reasonably decide that a loaf of bread from the shop is worth more than the time it takes to make. Convenience is usually what allows an already stretched household to keep functioning.

But convenience has become difficult to afford. When I compare the price of flour with the price of pasta, or raw peanuts with a finished jar of peanut butter, I'm deciding whether I can exchange some of my time for the money added by processing and retail.

I make bread because flour stretches further than loaves from the shop. I make pasta because eggs and flour can become a full family meal. Pizza no longer comes in a steamy cardboard box. Mayonnaise is scooped into the same sterilized jar.

None of this is performed with the breezy confidence of a lifestyle influencer. More often with some swearing and a rushed instruction to my family to "leave me alone for five goddam minutes" while I salvage the mayonnaise that just split - a deeply personal feeling of betrayal.

A return to an older Karoo logic

In the olden times - the times our grandmothers still reference - people living on farms or in isolated towns couldn't rely on readily available finished products. Distance on poor roads and limited money affected the household economy.

Basic ingredients had to become many different things. Flour became bread, rusks, dumplings and pastry. Milk became butter or cheese. Fruit was dried, bottled or turned into jam because one season had to last into the next.

These practices are often remembered romantically as evidence of a simpler life. They actually took hard work, planning and a constant awareness of waste - to which even I, with access to electricity and a blender, can attest.

There's fashionable language around making things from scratch, ideas like slow living and homesteading. Those ideas are valuable, and there's satisfaction in knowing how food is made and in being less dependent on heavily processed products, but for many South Africans, the movement back to homemade has happened because convenience has outstreched the household budget.

What the jar represents

Recovering these skills is useful and even empowering - but it's strill troubling that they're necessary. A society should not confuse household ingenuity with economic wellbeing. People are inventive while under pressure - stretching flour and turning a packet of peanuts into several weeks of sandwiches. But the pressure isn't harmless.

So yes, I make my own peanut butter, which tastes good and I am pleased that I know how, but I started making peanut butter because I looked at the price of the jar and, after clutching my chest in anguish, took down the packet of raw peanuts instead.

𝑊𝒊𝘵𝘩 𝘵𝙝𝙖𝗻𝑘𝘴 𝐟𝘰𝑟 𝑟𝙚𝐚𝒅𝒊𝑛𝙜,
𝘕𝘰🅼𝗶