Confession:
I have a thing for peanut butter. If my girlfriend didn’t tease me
about the habit, I’d probably have toast with peanut butter and honey as
“second breakfast” nearly every day. Goes so well with coffee …

But
anyway! So, I usually procure my peanut butter just like any other good hippie:
from one of those grinding contraptions at the health-food store. That
way, you know exactly what’s in it — peanuts, maybe salt — and it comes with the
oil fully incorporated, unlike jarred “natural” peanut butters, whose oil
separates from the paste.  

Every once in a while, I succumb to the jarred stuff when an organic
brand’s on sale. I like the saltiness of the jarred stuff. Soooo good.

Recently,
I found myself at a Whole Foods. While looking for something else —
really! — I encountered a display of Whole Foods 365 brand
organic creamy peanut butter. On sale. For a really low price. So I
threw a jar in my cart and went about my business.

Flash
forward to this very morning, at the first rumblings of hunger after an
early smoothie breakfast. With great anticipation, a piece of bread in
the toaster and the honey pot at the ready, I opened the new jar of
Whole Foods peanut butter. I was girded for the small inconvenience of
having to reincorporate the separated oil back into the paste. The
reward would be heaven on bread: sweet, salty, toasty, peanutty.

But
everything was wrong. Instead of a half-inch of oil at the top, a
grotesque sheen taunted me. You know, like the commercial crap,
the stuff Big Food tarts up with added fat to make it uniform and,
well, reliably  creamy. And sugar, following the general Big Food law
that Everything Must Be Sweetened.