“Things I’m Not Eating Anymore” is a photography project I hope will also serve as motivation to continue improving my overall health and eating habits. You can read the first post in this series that does a much better job of explaining all that, here.
For a brief period during elementary school, I attended after-school care at Mrs. Murray’s house on Main Street. She watched a gaggle of us schoolkids during the gap between when school let out till one of our parents could pick us up. I don’t remember much about my time there other than every day we were given the same choice for our afternoon snack: a freshly baked grilled cheese or a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I have a strong core memory of those crispy yet gooey grilled cheese sandwiches coming out of the oven en masse on a baking tray. Back then, like now, I was a “savory guy” and always picked the grilled cheese. This is clear evidence that I wasn’t always a “peanut butter guy.” Somewhere along the line, things changed.
PEANUT BUTTER
I don’t remember being inundated with peanut butter as a kid, although I did eat a fair amount of it in my elementary school cafeteria. PB&Js were the long-standing alternate choice for the daily school provided lunch. If you didn’t like what was being offered that day, you could order “the alternate,” which 100% of the time was a peanut butter and jelly sandwich served with an unnaturally orange-colored cheese wedge. I was a BIG alternate guy, mostly because of the cheese wedge. Of course, this would be a literal impossibility in today’s allergy aware academic environment but, as the historical docu-drama Stranger Things clearly illustrates, the 80’s were a different time.
I think if someone ran the numbers, I probably had less peanut butter and jellies than the average American child raised during the 70s and 80s. It probably didn’t help that my parents were the proprietors of a local restaurant. We didn’t stock a lot of snack-making items in our pantry at home. If you were peckish, that’s what the pizza place was for.
So, I can’t exactly pinpoint the origins of my transition to full-on peanut butter obsession. I did have a fondness for the peanut butter ripple ice cream at Stewart’s Drive-In, and at some point I started receiving a sizeable number of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup related gifts at the major candy-centric holidays, which I suppose is all of them. But these were minor blips on the food preference radar, and certainly nothing that would red flag a future issue. However, I can tell you the exact point in time when peanut butter and jelly sandwiches became not just an occasional treat, but a full-on problem.
My last two years of college I lived in an on-campus apartment without a university meal plan. Because of my restaurant experience growing up, I was more adept than most of my peers at meal planning. Even with that advantage, I was still first and foremost a cash-strapped academic trying to overcome real financial hurdles in an effort to feed myself.
Enter the peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
Cheap, calorie dense, easy to prepare, and damn tasty. It filled just about every square on the “meals for poor college students” bingo card. And boy did I eat a lot of them. And unlike ramen noodles, the frequency at which I consumed PB&Js never soured me on them in the long term. The sandwiches I ate earlier this year tasted just as good as the ones I woofed down listening to the new Pearl Jam album on my ratty third-hand couch in Montgomery apartments. That’s a lie. I never listened to Pearl Jam. I just had to pick a common cultural touchstone. Honestly, it was probably the Indigo Girls, but I digress.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t all good news on the PB&J front. Going into adulthood, those fond memories of feeding myself during college morphed into a variety of false psychological comforts associated with sandwich consumption. Had a rough day? A late night PB&J will smooth out that rough spot on your brain. Can’t sleep? A filling peanut butter sandwich with a glass of milk might help. As Chicago once wisely imparted, peanut butter, You’re a Hard Habit to Break.
I’m working on it.
Peanut butter is still awesome though. For those of you who can enjoy its sweet and salty goodness responsibly, let me leave you with the definitive Peanut Butter Buying Guide for the discerning snacker:
Acceptable Major Brands of Sugary Peanut Butter
- Jif
- End of list
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