Unfurled

I was procrastinating for a few hours and doing what I usually do which is to say, rifle through every blog, forum and online newspaper my fingertips can recall. Self-pay jails (at $82 a night), another bombing in Pakistan, the life and times of Tamara de Lempicka, but it was the following topic in coolrunning that sent me off on a whirlwind tour of sites not usually traveled (by me anyway): Better Peanut Butter?. Thus began my quest to discover more about PB2– an “all-natural” powdered peanut butter with a hefty reduction in fat and calories that has everyone from chowhound to hungrygirl to coolrunning clamoring for more. Not one dissenting opinion which I have to admit made me think twice about taking a second spoonful of my own freshly ground insanely decadent honey roasted peanut butter. Apparently it’s at least 90% if not 100% as good as the real thing.

The company, Bell Plantation, apparently has its roots in agricultural research and evolved into developing peanut-based products to help deal with the 1.2 billion pound peanut crop surplus and help out America’s peanut farmers. An opportunity to satisfy both my pb&j cravings and support the farming economy at 54 kcals per serving? My JetBlue Amex in hand, I was ready to plunge into the powdered PB pool and join the others. I happily registered as a new user and started to fill my cart.

At some point, I stopped to look through the rest of the site– I was curious to know how this masterful peanut butter was really created (to be honest I wondered, if peanut butter could be made to taste like peanut butter with 1/3 the calories and fat, then why hasn’t Skippy or Jif been able to make this leap? Was there some special process or were they just willing to sacrifice a whole lot more peanuts to help drain that surplus.).

Funny thing is: aside from the nutrition panel, I couldn’t find an ingredient list or even a rudimentary description of the peanut butter making process. Even in their FAQs, there was no comment on this. Rummaging through a few other blogs and other media, I found some reference to this being an ‘all-natural’ product, slow roasted and pressed to remove the fat, but from a third party source and it wasn’t even clear where she got her information.

I started to think too much I think. I suppose the feat of creating a low-cal peanut butter that tastes as good as the real-thing is enough. I should be happy about that. But I guess I’m suspicious by nature– if this was just a matter of squeezing the fat out, then why can’t Kraft (Proctor & Gamble) do it just as well?. It began to annoy me that a company that was selling a product to a potentially more nutrition (or at least calorie) aware consumer base would have addressed this issue a little more handily than with a picture that looks it was taken from the 1950’s archives.

I’m making a big deal out of something altogether trivial– part of this is because I am in fact, procrastating- the other part is because well, I’m irritated that most people just seem happy to have found the ‘no-pudge’ of peanut butters. The only problem is, I can’t think of any product for which there is a low-cal variant that tastes like the real thing.