Keeping up America’s standards is the job of NIST

“About every six months, I get an email: why is the peanut butter so expensive? Can I eat it? What does it taste like? Can you just send me a spoonful?”

Melissa Phillips is a research chemist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (nist) in Gaithersburg, Maryland, and makes a spirited defence of the peanut butter her agency sells—a snip at $1,069 for 510 grams. The American government is notorious for overpaying its suppliers, but consider what it charges as a seller. That same $1,069 gets you precisely 455 grams of baking chocolate. Meanwhile 60 grams of breakfast cereal or 50 grams of dry cat food will cost you a mere $1,064. These are among more than 1,100 Standard Reference Materials (srms) in the catalogue, which also includes New Jersey soil, whale blubber, urban dust, mussel (not muscle) tissue and slurried spinach. The prices vary, but are invariably high.