Fluff Festival Organizers Leading Campaign to Make the Fluffernutter the State Sandwich
It’s been nine long years since former State Representative Kathi-Anne Reinstein first submitted a legislative proposal to make the Fluffernutter—that delicious pairing of peanut butter and marshmallow Fluff—the official sandwich of Massachusetts.
This year, organizers of the annual Fluff Festival in Somerville will make a big push for the passage of the bill to finally happen.
“The stakes are high,” said Mimi Graney, Somerville’s resident Fluff expert and executive director of Union Square Main Streets, the non-profit organization that hosts the yearly marshmallow-appreciation festivities. “It’s time.”
When thousands of people gather in Union Square to eat Fluffernutters this Saturday, Graney will have volunteers pushing postcards that read, in part, “we love the Fluffernutters, they’re the greatest sandwiches,” into the hands of attendees, asking them to sign them so Union Square Main Streets can ship the messages to the State House.
The festival, called “What the Fluff?: A Tribute to Union Square Invention,” began nine years ago as a way to pay homage to Archibald Query, the inventor of the sugar-packed marshmallow substance who later sold off the recipe to Durkee-Mower Inc. for a mere for $500 in 1920. To this day, 94 years later, Fluff is still produced in Massachusetts by that same company at a factory in Lynn.
Since the festival’s inception, the idea to make the Fluffernutter the “sandwich or sandwich emblem of the Commonwealth,” has been a focal point of bringing awareness to Fluff’s history in the state.
With Reinstein no longer championing the bill as a legislative official—her time in office ended this year when she resigned—it’s up to supporters of the petition to make the designation a reality, and they are now at “the threshold of success.”
“We are so close we can taste it,” said Graney of the bill, which has been lingering in committee for years. “We all have to stick together to make this happen.”
