Grist Magazine, Aug 5, 2010
Straight to the Source
Confession: I have a thing for peanut butter. If my girlfriend didn't tease me about the habit, I'd probably have toast with peanut butter and honey as "second breakfast" nearly every day. Goes so well with coffee ...
But anyway! So, I usually procure my peanut butter just like any other good hippie: from one of those grinding contraptions at the health-food store. That way, you know exactly what's in it -- peanuts, maybe salt -- and it comes with the oil fully incorporated, unlike jarred "natural" peanut butters, whose oil separates from the paste.
Every once in a while, I succumb to the jarred stuff when an organic brand's on sale. I like the saltiness of the jarred stuff. Soooo good.
Recently, I found myself at a Whole Foods. While looking for something else -- really! -- I encountered a display of Whole Foods 365 brand organic creamy peanut butter. On sale. For a really low price. So I threw a jar in my cart and went about my business.
Flash forward to this very morning, at the first rumblings of hunger after an early smoothie breakfast. With great anticipation, a piece of bread in the toaster and the honey pot at the ready, I opened the new jar of Whole Foods peanut butter. I was girded for the small inconvenience of having to reincorporate the separated oil back into the paste. The reward would be heaven on bread: sweet, salty, toasty, peanutty.
But everything was wrong. Instead of a half-inch of oil at the top, a grotesque sheen taunted me. You know, like the commercial crap, the stuff Big Food tarts up with added fat to make it uniform and, well, reliably creamy. And sugar, following the general Big Food law that Everything Must Be Sweetened.
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