A Treat for the Mouth!

BIG fan of peanut butter, hmm?
Sure, of course you are – we all are! Check this out:

Yes, it may look like an ordinary jar of peanut butter, but look at that label closely! Much like you, it’s whipped!

It’s also got 1/3 less sugar, but don’t let that scare you off! Notice it doesn’t say what it has 1/3 less sugar than!

Oh, wait, actually it does.  In smaller print.

Anyhow, a pal turned me onto this stuff and now I’m hooked.  You can get it at the 99¢ Only store! And of course that begs the question, “Did this stuff not sell in regular stores and the Peter Pan Peanut Butter people are just dumping it at the dollar store before it expires to recoup some of the costs from what was presumably an enormous new-product roll-out (industry jargon), or was it made specifically for your dollar store retailers?”

I suppose I could look into this, but c’mon, neither of us really care. How much more interesting do you expect this damn thing to be? It’s a post on a blog, for goodness sake! Let’s not kid ourselves here!

The point is that the stuff is light and fluffy, and incidentally, that’s where the  “1/3 less sugar” notation comes from. Essentially, a standard jar of peanut butter this size, unwhipped, would contain 1/3 more condensed peanut butter…and the sugar that comes with it.

So you’re paying for a smaller amount of peanut butter that might otherwise come in a jar this size…if it wasn’t whipped up all frothy and light. So is 99¢ a fair price for a 9.3 ounce jar of peanut butter?

Let me answer that for you…by sticking a spoon in it…

…and then offering you a taste:

Go ahead, don’t be shy. I haven’t had an outbreak in weeks.

Now, I ask you, isn’t that something? This is peanut butter you can eat right out of the jar! And according to my pal, it has erotic applications as well! Well, actually she said you could frost a cake with it and I just presumed that was some sort of euphemism.

But if she wasn’t talking dirty, if I were to take what she said literally, then yes, you could absolutely frost a cake with this stuff. It’s just that light and fluffy.

And remember those 1970s Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups commercials with the “You got my chocolate in your peanut butter!” and the “You got your peanut butter on my chocolate!”…?  Well, finally, thirty-five years later, the fatal flaw of those commercials has been erased. The improbability has been significantly lessened. The suspension of disbelief formally required to embrace the ads’ message is no longer necessary: It now makes perfect sense to walk around eating peanut butter right out of the jar, and I mean walking around town, not around the kitchen in your underwear at three in the morning.

See that you do.

Posted by Ted on May 20, 2011, 9:00 AM.