What is baiting all about?

The way baiting was defined by my state back when I was starting out was food left to attract game. Salt and minerals were not bait. A food plot was not bait. Nor were scents.

A pile of corn was bait. It was illegal
A salt block was not.
Planting a few rows of corn and letting it grow was a good thing and encouraged.
Putting apple scent on your hat was legal.
Slathering peanut butter on a stump was not legal, but I do not remember anyone getting prosecuted.

None of this really matters a whit in my way of thinking.

Bait has a tendency to make deer visit at night when you are not there. It also has a hard time competing with the natural mast in a lot of areas.

Salt and minerals are great for attracting deer in July, but has minimal value by the time most seasons come in. Putting out a salt block on Halloween and expecting results in November is pure superstition.

Food plots are great for feeding deer in the big picture, they do things like reduce infant mortality, and increase winter survival. As an attractant, they are hit and miss. I rode past a soybean field on my way to work for years. In 10 years of riding past at all hours, and especially dawn and dusk, I saw only a handful of deer. If this had been a hunter's plot, he would have been aggravated.

Any kind of scent you put on yourself or on your boots or on a drag or in scent bombs are a 2-edged sword. It may attract a deer. It may also send the deer running like a scalded cat, because it is a scent that is strange to that area. In the 7 seasons I have eschewed scents, I have had vastly better luck in seeing and tagging deer. Maybe I was just doing it wrong. D&DH has been a good source over the years on the low-down about scents-- good and bad. They were the first to describe how fox-urine can send a deer scurrying.

Peanut butter? Molasses? If it's legal, I'm not going to fault anyone for giving stuff like this a try. I have not seen it produce miraculous results. Don't tell #2 son this, but I used to put stuff like this out the week before youth season to increase the little bug's chance of success. Zip. Nada. The deer ignored the molasses-soaked stump and went right to the acorns. There is still an old bleached peanut butter bucket out by one of the stands that I need to retrieve, before he finds it one of these years.