crunchy v. smooth nut butter

Like many American parents, I fed my daughter some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. My favorite peanut butter sandwich is peanut butter with banana slices. I don't remember if I ever served her that.  I don't recall, but my memory could be faulty, feeding her PB&J a lot but I always had peanut butter on hand.

I packed her lunch for her child care day the year before kindergarden, again in kindergarden. She did not like to get the school lunches when she still went to a public school with school lunches. 

Kids compared lunches. And many items a parent can tuck into their child's lunch have currency in the lunch swap business.  I used to often tuck in packaged strips of fruit leather, first the crappy kind with sugar but eventually our fruit strips were nothing but pure fruit. I knew Rosie bartered away most of those fruit strips because she told me so. She complained when I switched to the no-sugar, all fruit ones because they had lower value on the swap market.

I don't recall her telling me what she got in those trades. I would have just packed whatever it was she was hoping to get if she had asked. I don't think what she got mattered to her as much as having something that was desired by other kids. It was the act of swapping lunch treats that mattered, not the treats. Not so much.

As time passed, she and other children talked about lunch. And, apparently, the children preferred plain peanut butter to crunchy. If the preference, the popular choice, was plain, then a crunchy peanut butter sandwich had no value.

I was just fine with my daughter being unable to swap her crunchy peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on carefully chosen, whole grain, nutritious bread. I wanted her to eat the sandwich.

Again, and I could be wrong, I think the real concern was having things in her lunch box that other kids were willing to trade for.

One day, she asked me to stop giving her crunchy peanut butter. I explained that I had once read that one of the top sources for kid's choking on food was smooth peanut butter, which could get stuck in a child's throat and stop breathing briefly, sometimes long enough to harm or even cause the death of the child.

The article also said to slice hot dogs in half because the average hotdog bite could lodge in a child's throat. For a few years, I had sliced her hot dogs so she wouldn't choke, but then i coached her, extracting her promise that she would chew chew chew.

She brought up her preference for plain peanut butter a few times, with me always holding my ground. Until one day, when she was five or six, she started crying when, once again, I said I couldn't bring myself to buy plain peanut butter.

I don't think I told her, and this is my truth, that I prefer crunchy. She and I shared our household peanut butter. Maybe I should have just told her I like crunchy and don't I get to have some food in the house that matches my taste?

The last time, when I finally gave in and switched to plain, after I repeated yet again my anxiety about choking hazards from smooth nut butter, she was crying, unhappy and lamented "But mom, I am old enough to eat creamy peanut butter. I am old enough now."

To which I responded "I am not old enough, yet, honey, to buy plain peanut butter."

I may have never given her plain peanut butter. I really do prefer crunchy nut butters.

Nowadays, I eat no peanut butter. I eat almond butter. In Rainbow Foods earlier this week, I bought a jar of raw, organic almond butter. First I put the crunchy almond butter of my favorite brand into my shopping cart. As I began to walk away, however, I saw that the sixteen ounce jar of crunchy cost $19.95 and the smooth almond butte was only $13.35. So, for what I believe might be the first time in my whole sixty two years and counting, I bought the smooth.

So what does this price differential mean? It is not more expensive to make crunchy. Is crunchy more costly because it has greater demand or because it has less demand?

I quickly surveyed several brands of raw almond butter. There may have been three different brands. They all had the crunchy priced higher than the smooth.

Living with another one of life's mysteries. Why more for the crunch?