BOSTON — The Fluff war of 2006 began innocently enough, when 8-year-old Nathaniel Barrios asked one of his daddies to make him a Fluffernutter, his new favorite sandwich from school.
State Sen. Jarrett T. Barrios was indignant. He and his partner run a healthy household. Since when was one of their two sons eating peanut butter and Marshmallow Fluff?
When the Democratic legislator filed a measure to limit the amount of marshmallow spread that Massachusetts schools can serve at lunch, the Fluff flap broke out in full force.
The sugary spread known as Fluff is a native product, born nearly a century ago in the kitchen of Archibald Query in Somerville, a town in Barrios' district.
State Rep. Kathi-Anne Reinstein, also a Democrat, was one of two legislators who instantly retaliated with bills to make the Fluffernutter the official state sandwich.
"We have a state doughnut," Reinstein reasoned, tongue firmly in cheek. "The commonwealth has an official soil. There is a state shell and a state beverage. We have a state muffin, a state dessert, a state cookie, an official state children's book, a state polka song, a state ceremonial march -- why not make the Fluffernutter the official state sandwich?"
A message board on the Boston Globe website nearly burst its cyberseams as Fluff fans recalled their childhood affection for a substance that looks remarkably like Styrofoam. Others assailed Barrios for his legislative priorities.
"Saugus' sewer system is falling apart, Everett's school system is corrupt, and THIS is what he chooses to speak out about!" railed a poster going by the moniker "sanitycheck."
At the Fluff factory in Lynn, north of Boston, the president of the 86-year-old company sloughed off Barrios' charge that his product lacked nutritional value.
"It's not marketed as a health food," Don Durkee noted.
Fluff has about the same caloric value as jam or jelly, Durkee said, and no one in the Legislature is picking on those American sandwich staples. Moreover, Fluff has no fat or cholesterol, "and almost immeasurable sodium," Durkee pointed out.
"Peanut butter," he said, "offsets the things we don't have, by adding protein."
H. Allen Durkee, Don's father, and friend Fred L. Mower paid $500 for the Fluff recipe in 1920 and began marketing the concoction door-to-door. The history section on the company website describes how the entrepreneurs had to cut back production during World War II, when sugar rations were low.
