If you have been active on the internet, there’s a great chance that you noticed this image of a peanut butter jar which had its price labelled as $761. That’s too expensive for a jar of peanut butter. Especially for a jar of it which has no added precious metal powder, or diamonds or anything else either. It is a standard ordinary form of the most popular american spread – the peanut butter.
If you are interested, you can buy it here on the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s website, as a standard material of reference. It’s up to you to decide because for 761 dollars you would only get around 500 grams of it. Or you probably can’t even buy it because it is meant as a standard material for scientists, governmental regulatory agencies and manufacturers around the world. According to NIST, it is perfectly homogeneous. That is to say that any part of it you take, you’d get the same composition.
This is one of the 1400 such items you can buy on that website. Others are lake Michigan fish tissue, spinach slurry, new york waterway sediment, SPAM (meat homogenate) and more… all of these for around 700 dollars or more.
More about it on [Smithsonian]