Creamy>Crunchy: Megan Curling

Groundnut. Goober. Monkey nut. Arachis hypogaea. Legume crop. Whatever you call the common peanut, one thing is for sure, it is a magical food.

   With endless preparation options, you seemingly cannot go wrong. You have dry roasted, lightly salted, sautéed, salted, ballpark, boiled, deep fried, peanut flour, peanut oil, peanut sauce, comic strip, no matter how you prefer your peanuts, if you are eating them, you are living a good life.

   Well… with one exception: Satan of the nut butter world. Oh sorry, I meant to say crunchy peanut butter.

   “Crunchy peanut butter is the prequels [Star Wars], chock-full of unwanted characters that have no true relationship with the plot,” RJR senior and creamy peanut butter lobbyist Harry Capizzi commented on the trash that is crunchy peanut butter.

    Do not get me wrong, I am personally a really big fan of things filled with lots of texture. I love a good celery stick, a handful of blueberries, and do not even get me started on artichokes.

   But here is the thing, peanut butter is a spread. It is something that you put on top of something else. You are not eating it on its own. That is, unless you are a dog or a five year old. Any other case and you probably should not be eating peanut butter straight off the spoon anymore.

   As a spread, you might put peanut butter on a bagel, a piece of bread with some jelly, perhaps a saltine, the possibilities are endless.

   Odds are, whatever you are applying the peanut butter to already has its own flavor profile and texture that is meant to be amplified by your addition of nutty goodness. Therefore, why would you ever wish to ruin the complement of flavors by throwing yet another texture of gross, stuck in your teach, too much jaw action crunchy peanut butter?

   Creamy peanut butter is something sent from above. The grooves from the butter knife in it are spectacular and it spreads across any surface like it has been looking forward to for years.

   I have a sneaking suspicion that if you enjoy your knife getting caught by bits of peanut every four seconds, that you might also enjoy cutting wrapping paper in multiple cuts with a noise similar to fork in a blender rather than the smooth one cut glide that non-psychopaths tend to prefer.

   I cannot think of many arguments for creamy peanut butter over its possessed sibling because honestly, before a certain person came along, I thought that the monsters that live under beds and eat crunchy peanut butter were all fake but, here we are.

   All I can say is that as humans, we enjoy creamy foods. They are comforting, they feel like home, they are familiar. They are not, however, filled with chunks. When was the last time you purposefully left chunks in food? Yeah, I cannot remember either.

   Simply put, crunchy peanut butter is lazy. If I wanted peanuts on my bagel, I would put a generous handful of Planters Dry Roasted. But alas, the craving for a dry mouth has never come to me, I’ll stick with creamy golden goodness.

   Listen, if you have not learned a single thing from the last 30 seconds of your life that you spent reading this or you do not agree with me yet, that is okay, just remember one thing.

   “Life’s too short to waste your time fooling around with nuts,” Capizzi added.

Crunchy>Creamy: John Paynter

 If you are like me at all, you love food. I mean, who doesn’t, right? Humans are hardwired through evolutionary traits, to eat food and to love food. Some people like it more than others and those others, well, those others are wrong.

   Food is important, it is important to eat food because it sustains us and, most of all, because it tastes good. That’s what really matters. Why would we eat anything that doesn’t taste good? It just does not make sense.

   Flavor is the single-handed most important thing when it comes to eating, that which is only next to health and nutritional value. So like any good food debate, we must first define flavor.

   Flavor is defined by the combination of tastes, textures, savors, and scents that make up the food we choose for our daily indulgences. So why would we ever eat something that goes against this one core value that judges what we eat on a daily basis? This is my question that has yet to be answered in defense of  creamy peanut butter.

   There is no doubt that the peanut holds the secret to the gateway of flavors and values that are harnessed in quick, time-crunched meals. When crushed into a coarse butter, peanuts become the golden savory nectar that holds the world of spreadables in the palm of its hand. No spreadable can surpass that of the crushed peanut. That is, only if it is of the chunky variety.

   Chunky peanut butter is the superior type of peanut butter for a multitude of reasons.

   Texture is an extremely important thing, even my opponent can attest to that. So let’s discuss the textures in this high-stakes debate.

   Why waste time on creamy peanut butter when you could have a beautifully orchestrated crunch in every bite of your meal with the wonders of the natural chunky peanut butter. It is as if the hand of Jesus Christ crushed each peanut in his fingers and laid them in a golden butter that spreads across your toast or bagel like the waves ripple across a shoreline on a warm summer’s day.

   I am not sure about you, but that’s a much better image in the head than that of its diarrhea-textured creamy counterpart. Yeah, I am sure that image spreads quite nicely across your toast. I just certainly hope you do not choose to eat it.

   The crunch is the single texture that every sensible human strives for. When was the last time you heard someone argue over the middle piece of the brownie? Exactly, everyone wants the crunch of the corner piece, mixed with the chocolate chunks. In fact, this is why the, now famous, cookie came to existence. So you get the crunch in every serving, that is, if you don’t forget any of the key ingredients.

   In conclusion, as if I even need to prove my point further, just take this nugget of wisdom wherever you go. You can not have life without nuts, so you might as well embrace them and enjoy them.

Photo Provided by Creative Commons