I’ll admit it. I have a peanut butter problem. I’ve had it my entire life. When I was little I started off eating apples and peanut butter. I would put a huge mound of peanut butter on my plate, and then use the apple slices as a conduit. I would dip my apple in, taking tiny bites of the flesh adorned with piles of the delicious butter. Eventually, I just took to licking the peanut butter off, and then reluctantly eating the apple so as not to give myself away. I then progressed to the tablespoon technique. I would walk into the kitchen after a tough afternoon of playing outside and, using a spoon that was roughly the size of my mouth, would eat peanut butter like ice cream, savoring every bite. It wasn’t refreshing. Instead it left me with what my family always called “baby mouth,” the overwhelming desire to drink a glass of milk to wash the stubborn food down without leaving sticky remnants on my tongue and in my throat. (“Baby mouth” was also a common diagnosis following the consumption of an especially rich cookie or brownie.) Unfortunately for me I never enjoyed milk so the non-dairy alternatives my mom kept around, which didn’t exactly do the trick, often had to be a sub-par stand in. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches hold the jelly were my lunch of choice. Luckily for me I was active — I did gymnastics and was a fan of playing escape games, imagining my swings as horses, aiding me in my flight from an evil school teacher — so the peanut butter never really had a negative impact.
And then I went to college. I specifically remember one afternoon during my sophomore year, after going for a short run and in the middle of studying for midterms, when I stress ate what had to be 1/3 a jar of Skippy. I didn’t realize what I was doing until halfway through my Spanish flashcards when I looked down and noticed the giant canyon in my peanut butter. Whoops. I tried to rectify the situation by dancing furiously to an entire Eminem album which then left me, post peanut butter binge fest, with a pretty epic stomach ache. I took a break from the sticky snack for awhile.
Then, during my junior year abroad, I made it a sort of game to try and locate peanut butter in every exotic location I found myself. I had always thought peanut butter was an international treat but, as it turned out, people regarded the American’s love of peanut butter with much the the same combination of curiosity and disgust that I associate with the consumption of Vegemite. Also, being an import, a small tub of Skippy or Jiff could easily run you $8 in small town Dahanu, India or city like Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, a price tag that seems off-putting, especially when set in the context of an academic program that preached the benefits of locally produced food and decreased globalization.
My peanut butter habit, although abandoned for a time following my international adventures, came back with a vengeance a few years ago. I could easily go through a jar in less than the 14 days it should take a person to consume its entirety if based on the advertised serving size. A tablespoon is really very small, as it turns out. Or at least, it’s small when it comes to peanut butter. So, given my slowing metabolism, I decided about a year ago to try and not keep peanut butter in the house most of the time. Sometimes I cave, “needing it for a recipe,” and then it doesn’t last long, but for the most part I can steer clear. For the most part, I don’t really miss it. Except recently.
This past week I have had not one, but two dreams featuring peanut butter. Two dreams, two nights in a row. In the first dream I walked into the kitchen, opened the cabinet where my two roommates keep their food, and discovered a jar of Peter Pan. Yum! I grabbed a spoon and took a bite, just a little one, hoping my roommate wouldn’t discover the missing butter. But then I got carried away. I ate and ate and ate and all of a sudden the jar was half empty! In a panic, and instead of doing the logical thing of placing that jar in my cabinet and buying a replacement for my roommate, I took the jar into my room and hid it in the back of my underwear drawer. And then I woke up, insanely thirsty.
In the second dream, I was at a Very Important Meeting with some Very Important People. The meeting took place in a large office with a huge, rectangular conference table in the middle. The table was full of people with computers, reviewing boring Power Point presentations (because that is what I imagine happens at meetings, apparently). I was the only one not looking at a computer. Instead, I sat at my seat, peanut butter and spoon in hand, snacking away until one of my co-workers said, with snort, “I’m allergic to peanut butter! Get it away from me!” At which point I took my spoon, my peanut butter and myself and moved to the corner, where I quietly ate for the remainder of the meeting.
The end.
franklyrebekah 