110 thoughts on “February 5, 2016: Fight for your right to PBJ”

  1. I don't see what's so great about that. I've gotta bring my own meals to work. If work were providing them, I wouldn't protest too much.

      1. Peanut butter brownies? I'm in. But on a sandwich? Not a chance.

        "Here, have some bread covered in gooey stuff that will make each bite mash up in your mouth and turn into a dry, sticky mess that you will need to chew for 5 minutes before you can swallow it, despite having one mushy texture."

        Nope.

        3. As often as not, I'm having peanut butter and jelly on the way to work. Ideally a natural PB. I like chunky, but am generally out-voted by the family, so have to settle for creamy.

                1. Toasted English muffin with chunky peanut butter and honey on top is the best light breakfast.

                  2. I cannot agree with that. Toasted English muffin calls for butter. Once the butter has melted and filled all the holes, honey or jam is acceptable.

                  2. Neat trick:

                    1. Go to the baking section of the store. Get "chopped peanuts" or whatever they have. Maybe it's in the Ice Cream toppings section, I don't know.
                    2. Sprinkle those on top of your creamy-peanut-buttered bread before completing the sandwich.
                    3. ??
                    4. Crunchy Peanut Butter!

        5. Also really good: Sunflower-seed butter. It's kindof runny though.
          My kids eat PBJs so often. Six meals a week, maybe? And that doesn't include toast.

          I usually don't seek out PBJs, but my kids often make more than they can eat, so I eat their leftovers (or just crusts, whatever).
          I more often eat just honey or jam on bread, because I'm just having a snack. If I heat or toast the bread, I'll often "butter" the bread with reserved bacon grease first.

          I didn't care much creamy or chunky but avoided chunky when I had braces.

    3. I'm with Nibs. Peanut butter is on the same level as ketchup as garbage foods suitable for feeding the children, but not something a grown-up should put in their mouth intentionally.

          1. thumbs up on mayo with fries and malt vinegar with fries. Not so much on the combination thereof with fries (but mayo + ketchup with fries is pretty darned good).

      2. Back in the day, we got peanut butter sandwiches and cheese in the school lunchroom (often) as the gubmint was buying from farmers because they were making more output than they could sell for a reasonable profit.

  4. I finally got around to reading bS's link, and is the problem actually the peanut butter or is it the jelly? The article mentions that GSW's staff banned sugar, but to make peanut butter all you need is peanuts and something to grind up the peanuts into peanut butter--no added sugar required.

    But I think it'd be difficult to make jam/jelly without sugar, or at least without something that's effectively equivalent to sugar, like honey.

    2. You can make either with or without sugar. Peanut butter most people eat in the US does have added sugar.

      1. I realize most commercial PB has added sugar, but if the team is that concerned about it, they can give the players PB without added sugar. The players may even like it better. They spend tens of millions of dollars on their salaries, it doesn't seem like it'd ruin the team to spend a bit more on what they feed these guys.

        1. I assumed you knew. The hidden sugar in PB is probably something more people should know about. Though if I'm grabbing a jar it is titled JIFF.

            1. The Kirkland peanut butter is what we get when we go. So many peanuts must have died for that 2-pack...

    3. But I think it'd be difficult to make jam/jelly without sugar, or at least without something that's effectively equivalent to sugar, like honey.

      Oooh, my experience making jam is suddenly relevant! Yes, to make jam the traditional way, you need a lot of sugar along with your fruit--as well as a little acid and often additional pectin. Further information here.

      Some low-sugar methods for making jam exist--for example, using Pomona's Pectin, a type of pectin that doesn't need sugar to jell. And there are also recipes using Splenda or other artificial sweetners. But of course the fruit itself still contains sugar.

      Presumably, though, the players are using store-bought jam and not making their own.

      1. I don't know how Golden State's staff sees it, but personally I'd rather see them eating more traditional jam with sugar in it than eating jam with Splenda or some other artificial sweetener in it, since I imagine the point is to keep them from eating junk food and for as much work as those guys put in on and off the court, I doubt the sugar in the jam is really going to have any kind of real negative impact on their health.

        And yeah, like the PB, I'm sure the players are buying it at the store, but that doesn't mean they'd have to. I know the Seahawks have a team chef and source their food in ways that they think will help the team. How much does it help? I don't really know, but it seems like a worthwhile investment when you consider how much money is at stake with the players' health. And NBA teams, with a longer season, presumably have an even better opportunity to influence their players' diets.

        1. Plus, it seems like the higher frequency of games means diet might have an even bigger effect on actual in-game performance than it might for football. Every sportswriter ever makes a big deal about how playing the second night of a back-to-back takes such a toll on the players. If there was a way to change players' diets enough to improve even just that particular circumstance, I'd imagine it would be worth it to the team.

          Granted, that assumes that there is actually a way to improve the players' performance with diet, but it at least seams plausible that a professional dietician could come up with something that would lead to better performance than, say, the Lamar Odom diet (meaning candy, not drugs).

          1. I think there's probably a lot of evidence that nutrition makes a difference for high level sports performance (body composition at the least), but you're probably going to make the biggest difference when you go from "no plan at all, eating lots of crap because you're young and can get away with it" to "we've got some kind of thought-out plan." Even Michael Phelps eating at McDonalds (and elsewhere) to get in his 12,000 calories had a plan--namely, if I'm going to spend five hours a day in the pool, I'm going to have to eat loads of food.

            Once you get to the stage of having a thought-out (and executed) plan, then it probably becomes difficult to gain a big edge from one strategy to another. I'd imagine at that level it gets pretty personalized too, some athletes might do better higher/lower carb, or will be more compliant with a slightly less "ideal" plan, which makes it better than the "ideal" plan because compliance is better.

            And to be fair, I think teams pay a lot more attention to this than they did even as recently as the '90s.

            1. Re: Phelps.
              I never ate as much in my life as when I was a middle-schooller in swim club. I've long suspected that it must be that the body uses so many calories to maintain temperature.

              1. Yeah, I bet that's a big part of it. Also, at Phelps' distances, it's a strength-endurance sport where he needs calories to fuel the efforts but also protein and whatnot (that's the technical term) to keep on the appropriate muscle mass. I wonder what Michael Johnson ate like back in '96.

            2. And to be fair, I think teams pay a lot more attention to this than they did even as recently as the '90s.

              No doubt.

              See, I can be non-cynical sometimes!

      2. Splenda jam is horrible. I got some from someone and each time I forget that it's the "icky jar", I'm faced with disappointment.
        Some people's palates can tolerate artificial sweeteners, but I can't. I think both aspartame and sucralose taste like rancid sugar.
        My in-laws went strongly low-carb for a while, and they'd make delicious-smelling barbecue ribs. But it was sucralose BBQ sauce and tasted bad. I think I bought some real-sugar sauce to cover it up.

        I'd rather have something unsweet than fake sweet. (Like the ribs without sauce. Or water over diet soda.)
        I guess it's in the uncanny valley of taste for me. (Carob instead of chocolate is fine though, because carob doesn't taste like an imitation chocolate, but an alternative.)

        1. Co-sign. I don't sauce ribs when I smoke them. Just dry-rub. If you need sauce, you are insulting my ribs.

          1. Co-co-sign. Except for the sauce. I understand the concept, but love the sauce too much to pass it up.

            1. I think you can do both. I made brisket over the holidays with a rub, then on the smoker for 5-6 hrs. Cut off the ends when they were done, then moved them over into a pan with home-made barBQ sauce under low heat. BAM!

      3. I helped my sister make jam this summer in Alaska! Actually, I just helped pick Salmonberries, Raspberries, and Blueberries.
        I picked some Nagoonberries (the best wild raspberry I've ever had), but we ate them all fresh.

            2. There was another Raspberry up there that had only like 5 segments per berry, but they were big (for a raspberry segment), all juice when bitten, and so very tart.
              I kept a little diary of my trip. I'll have to look up the number of varieties of wild berries I consumed.
              I was too far north to find thimbleberries, which I ate ridiculous amounts of in Colorado on my honeymoon. Did I trick my wife? Had she ever seen me in a foraging haze before we were wed?

              I haven't looked it up, but I've got a nagging concern that "Nagoonberry" may be based on an ethnic slur against the natives.

              1. A very quick search seems to only confirm it as the informal name for the Arctic raspberry. Searching "nagoonberry" and "slur" didn't come up with anything conclusive.

                1. Apparently "nagoon" is a Tlingit word, but the Repository doesn't include any mention of it being offensive:

                  In the Pacific Northwest of western Canada and the northwestern United States, it is sometimes called the nagoon or nagoonberry, a name which derives from the Tlingit neigóon.

  5. Heh. I never imagined that my emergency cuppa would generate such a robust discussion.

    I wonder if a post tomorrow about the merits of canned sardines will be equally as productive....

            1. Aye.
              Bought my first jar of this at a Whole Foods last Sept. Replenished my supply in mid-Nov. In my world, a jar of preserves (not the jelly that Kernel eats on her thrice-weekly PB&J w/ Nutella) would generally last four months.

      2. My old man makes peanut butter and summer sausage sammies all the time. Always has. its an acquired taste.

          1. It's a very savory sandwich. I love it, especially sitting around my parents table after shooting the shit with my brothers late into the evening.

        2. Be right back, need to go to the store.

          I did have a burger with peanut butter in it last summer when I was in Muncie. It was something of a revelation.

        3. FW's grandmother made eggs & PB on toast. She loves it, as it reminds her of her grandmother. She also readily admits it's weird for anyone else.

        5. Holy crap, meat. Does my father have a secret, second family?

          My dad also includes raw onion and mustard into that mix. Sometimes braunschweiger instead of summer sausage.

    2. I have yet to delve into canned sardines, but I find canned tuna to be a useful and tasty foodstuff.

          1. It used to be shrimp and pasta (with the sauce and vegetable rotating each time) thrice a week, but not as often now that the Valet is eating real food (I would guess just weekly now). The Valet LOVES meat, so meatloaf is much more common and we just discovered the premade pot roast at Trader Joe's that just needs to be out in the crockpot. Oh, and their tamales, are also in the weekly rotation.

  6. The only times I've eaten pb&j in the last twenty years have been on the MS150 rides where they have them as snacks at the pit stops. I find peanut butter disgusting for the most part, but that sandwich (and the saltiness of it) hits the spot on those rides.

    1. When I did Seattle to Portland, PBJ was a staple in training and on the ride, but I don't think I had another PBJ for at least a year after that I had gotten so tired of them.

    2. Anyone tried the powdered peanut butter? Saw that last time in Hugo over the holidays.

    4. This bothers me. He doesn't have nearly enough information to come to that conclusion yet. He shouldn't speculate. It will just give his opponents ammo.

    2. They have a ginger ale one too, right? That one sounds intriguing at least.

      A buddy brought over a pack of Best Damn Hard Root Beer last weekend. I wouldn't quite call it gross, but I wouldn't call it good, either.

      1. Yeah, there is a ginger ale too.

        We carry 3 different hard root beers, and I would say Coney Island probably gets the most sells. Then Not Your Fathers Root Beer. And I think only 1 Best Damn Root Beer has left the shelf.

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