Almost every day during my elementary school years, I took a peanut butter sandwich for lunch and bought a small container of milk in the lunchroom. My mother encouraged me to try alternative foods, but I liked peanut butter sandwiches. I was happy.
She satisfied her own need for variety by adding a piece of fruit or a cookie, anything to offset the monotony of my chosen noonday meal. I don’t ever remember being teased bout my waxed paper wrapped sandwich. In fact, a number of my table-mates had made identical choices.
Decades later when I traveled to Jesup from the coast to teach at the high school for three years, I consumed a peanut butter sandwich and a cup of black coffee during my morning drive. Watching the sun rise while I snacked on my favorite sandwich never grew old.
Since I’ve retired, I seldom make myself a peanut butter sandwich any more, but my guilty pleasure these days is to eat an occasional glob of peanut butter off of a teaspoon. I enjoy this sweet/salty substance like a lollipop or an ice cream cone.
Whenever I treat myself to this 100-calorie snack, I can hear Julie Andrews singing “A spoonful of …” Of course she was singing about sugar helping the medicine go down, but I only hear the word, spoonful.”
I hadn’t shared the secret of my guilty pleasure with anyone until I recently read a magazine interview with Martha Stewart. The reporter asks, “Would it surprise people to find you eat straight from the container? “No,” the celebrity chef says. “Everybody does that. Don’t you eat peanut butter out of the jar? A little spoon, right? It’s a good thing for moments just like this.”
Stewart also reveals why she prefers hosting guests for breakfast. “I live on a farm. The nicest part of the day is the morning. Everyone is fresh and happy. The day is just beginning.”
Such an observation underscores why I enjoyed my morning commute with the rising sun so much.
While I’ve always preferred my peanut butter straight, many folks often combine a second taste with theirs - grape jelly, banana slices, marshmallows, pickles.
In spite of my simple preference, I appreciate the news that an 8-year-old, a second grader at the Hilton Head Island School for the Creative Arts, won the Jif Most Creative Peanut Butter Sandwich this spring. Being named a finalist won her a trip to New York City to prepare her winning concoction: “P-Nutty BBQ Chicken Quesadilla” for the judges. She competed against a 9-year old’s “Chomp Burger,” a 6-year-old’s “Blue Monkey Breakfast Pita,” an 11-year-old’s “Eggy Nutty Sandwich” and an 8-year-old’s “PB All Dressed Up. As winner, she has received a $25,000 college fund plus and additional $10,000 for books and supplies. The other four finalists each received a $2,500 college fund.
I cannot reflect about peanut butter without recalling a time when our oldest granddaughter was a toddler. I had made her a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch. Later, I heard her exclaim to her mother how good that sandwich was. With those few words of praise, I was experiencing a true grandmother high. Evidently, I thought, I had spread just the right amount of peanut butter and an equal proportion of jelly.
However, my proud balloon burst when I heard the child, whose mother offered her children only healthy choices of food such as whole wheat bread, whisper, “Marnie uses white bread.” So much for my perfect technique.
But of all peanut butter stories I’ve ever heard, my favorite is still the legend arising from the work of Dr. George Washington Carver, agricultural chemist.
As the tale goes, he asked God to give him the secret of the universe. And God replied, “Little man, you’re too small to grasp the secrets of the universe.”
Carver then asked for the secrets of the world. And God refused him.
Finally out of frustration, Carver asked for the secret of the peanut. And God said, “That’s just your size.
Aren’t we glad?
Carver discovered more than 300 uses for the peanut. Today, there are thousands of products containing peanuts or peanut butter. One half of all peanuts grown in the U. S. Are used to make peanut butter. Carver also discovered hundreds of uses for soybeans, pecans and sweet potatoes.
Hd says, “I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting station, through which God speaks to us every hour, if we will only tune in.”
While many of us have benefitted from his multitude of discoveries, who among us initiates conversations with God as he did, or even more important, listens as attentively?
2012
Comments