Peanut Butter And Jelly

Peanut Butter And Jelly

Peanut butter and jelly presented in stripes in the same jar. Such is the unappetizing quality of this splintery, cheap stuff that a jar of it sat untouched in the kitchen of The Onion’s Chicago office for well over a year before someone finally disposed of it. And our kitchen is the kind of place where ravenous, invisible hordes normally devour any food left unattended, so rapidly that we theorize they could beat out a school of Amazonian piranhas in a skeletonize-a-cow speed contest. What did we learn from this experience? Mostly that while peanut butter goes well with a lot of things, those things don’t necessarily belong in the same jar with it, at least not for people above age 8 or so.

Because face it, peanut butter is essentially for kids. It’s an efficient protein-delivery system, but it’s also a samey brown paste loaded with fat and calories, even in its “natural” form. (Processed commercial peanut butters generally add a lot more sugar or corn syrup.) It’s tasty, but simplistic, lazy comfort food, the kind of thing we treasure when older largely because it’s so easy to work with that for a lot of us, peanut-butter-and-whatever sandwiches were the first thing we learned how to make on our own. Peanut butter tastes like proud childhood independence and freedom. But even in this age of gourmetified, high-end everything, is there a place on the market for fancy peanut butters aimed at adults?

Apparently so. When a friend of mine informed the world (via Twitter, chosen platform of such benignly minor revelations) that he was trying a chocolate-chip-cookie-dough-flavored peanut-butter sandwich, I had to ask whether it was a commercial product, or if he’d just run out of bananas and tossed a hunk of Pillsbury’s best on his toast instead. He pointed me to the website of P.B.Loco, a Minneapolis-based company making fancy flavored PB concoctions, and advertising them in a low-key, tongue-in-cheek way.