LUV & HAT

LUV - Thank you, North America, for your generous bounty of peanut butter. It’s delicious. It improves everything it touches – sandwiches, chocolate biscuits, my hair. My hair has never tasted so good. Peanut butter is amazing – and its thick, glutinous, salty-sweet denseness is so versatile. You can use peanut butter for virtually any purpose.

Want to avoid talking to an annoying housemate or work colleague? As soon as you see the offending party approaching the kitchen/your desk, trowel a thick layer of peanut butter onto some bread and shove the lot into your mouth. Et voila – you’ve basically cemented the inside of your mouth with sticky deliciousness, and conversation is now impossible. If they try to talk to you, shrug apologetically a few times, say WORRIE, AR EAKIG WEANUCK WUCKER and display your tongue until they go away.

Curious about what your friends sound like when they orgasm, but not enough of a creep to bug their bedrooms? Just substitute peanut butter for butter in a chocolate cake recipe, feed it to them, and watch carefully. Because they’ll moan. They’ll flop about. Their eyes will roll back in their heads. Some of them might fall to the ground and start frothing in anaphylactic shock because of their terminal peanut allergies but, let’s be honest, you’ll probably get off on that too.

Hate yourself and need to do something decadent that will both a) drown out the overflowing well of repressed guilt and anger, and b) really come back to bite you in your expanding behind a few days from now? Simply stand in your kitchen wearing just your pants and eat an entire jar of peanut butter with a teaspoon while crying. Er, apparently.

Peanut butter is wonderful. And it’s saving the world, too. Plumpy’nut (and this is a true thing) is a peanut butter-based food that’s administered to people with severe malnutrition in famine-stricken countries, and my eating three peanut butter and jam sandwiches in a row is basically the same thing. I’m a HERO and you shut up.

You can use peanut butter to clean leather and remove stuck-on price labels. You can use it to get chewing gum out of fabric, carpet, and human hair. Truly - of all the food pastes – peanut butter is king. I mean, can Shippam’s fish paste get chewing gum out of human hair? Can foie gras? I say NO but, if you disagree, by all means try to prove me wrong. Video evidence please.
- Robyn Wilder

HAT - When I’m made mayor of all the world - something that I’ve pencilled in for the middle of next week - I won’t ban peanut butter. That would be too easy. Instead, I’m going to visit the home of everyone who ever buys a jar of peanut butter and tattoo ‘I LIKE PEANUT BUTTER AND AM THEREFORE INHERENTLY UNTRUSTWORTHY’ right across the entirety of their face.

Because people need to know. People need to know not to trust anyone who likes peanut butter. It’d make life so much easier. Imagine if you were interviewing a potential babysitter. It’s an important decision. You’re looking for someone who will look after the single most precious thing in your entire life. Wouldn’t it be useful to know upfront if they were the sort of person who - when tasked with making a sandwich - would skip the more obviously delicious fillings like meat and cheese, and the more charmingly old-fashioned options of jam and marmalade, and instead slather their bread in a kind of borderline-inedible beige concrete made from what look like malformed, healed-over, psoriasis-stricken baby penises? Of course it would.

It’s foolproof. You cannot trust anyone who likes peanut butter. Anyone. Look at Claire from Lost. She once spent an entire episode crawling around on a beach screaming “CHORLOY! CHORLOY OI WONT ME PEENAT BATTUR CHORLOY!” and then - boom - just a few seasons later she’d transformed into a swivel-eyed lunatic with an animal skull for a baby. The catalyst for this? Peanut butter.

And it doesn’t end there. In 1990, Jo Absolom became the face of Sun-Pat peanut butter by starring in one of history’s most irritating adverts. Seven years later he joined the cast of EastEnders, a platform he used to broadcast his love of godawful britpop bands like Ocean Colour Scene and Shed Seven wherever possible. Why did he insist on telling so many people that he liked such shitty music, and while modelling such a shitty haircut? Simple. Peanut butter.

Peanut butter has nothing going for it. In sandwiches it is unpleasantly claggy. In chocolate it is unpleasantly claggy. In biscuits and fudge and brownies and soup it is unpleasantly claggy. And salty. In fact, I’d be tempted to suggest that people who like peanut butter would like their food more if it had sperm in it. Old sperm. From a dead animal.

I wish I was allergic to peanuts. I wish everyone was allergic to peanuts. Because then there wouldn’t be any argument about how disgusting peanut butter is. This post would consist of me nodding sadly as Robyn Wilder started shitting everywhere and mouthing “Help me” again and again through her uncontrollably swelling face. In fact, that might have probably been more entertaining than this post. Ah well.
- Stuart Heritage