My Mother and Peanut Butter of the 1974

I'm going to ping Moonman for this because he prompted it by talking shit about peanut butter (@sun).

My mum was a bit of a Ameriphile. She collected soft drink cans (with pull-off tabs back then), which her bohemian friends brought into the country.

One day, she obtained a jar of peanut butter. I don't remember if it was glass, but it was similar from the outside to what we can buy today. But the taste was radically different. It was the taste of America.

BTW, it was chunky (with chunks of peanut), which should tell you that it was produced at a factory. You may know that peanut butter is made by crushing peanuts. So the chunks of peanuts are mixed into the butter post-factum.

When I arrived to the U.S. in 1997, I went to Safeway to buy peanut butter. It was at the age when Jif has already became prevalent. Well, imagine my surprise.

But wait, this is not just a regular boomer story. I'm more obsessive than that. I went from store to store, and tried every imaginable brand of peanut butter. And then one day I found a place that still had a peanut butter press available to shoppers.

But nope. Freshly made peanut butter from real peanuts was not that either. It's amazing in its own way, but it's different from what Americans took for peanut butter in 1974. Back then, peanut butter was already very finely mashed. Just one pass of a press would not make it. Like I said, made at a factory.

This is something I'll have to take to my grave, unless Elon's Neuralink lets me share memories.

Attached: a photo of a lunchbox that my mum brought to me from America. It was embellished with the mythos of the 1776, which was completely alien and also fascinating for me. The box turned out to be a fairly common item, and the photo is actually from a contemporary eBay listing.