a story about peanut butter

making sense of an American staple and personal identity

I chose to go to Kalamazoo College mainly because they were the only school I had been accepted to that told me that even as a pre-med student, I’d be almost pressured to go on study abroad. From a young age, I was incredibly lucky that my parents had taken my brothers and I to Germany. Being pulled out of second grade for the week of Thanksgiving is still fuzzy but also one of the clearest memories of that time. I recall spending a lot of time at my aunt’s house when I came back, and well into the following summer I told my older cousin how we should try to move to Germany and live together. Such is the simplicity of a third-grade mind.

This dream always stuck with me. But I also loved my studies and had planned to be a doctor after those four years. The dream morphed alongside a desire to learn Spanish. Practicality tends to win over romanticism, and, given there are many more Hispanophones in the U.S., I saw German slip from the top spot.

I hadn’t fully appreciated that this great adventure to study abroad in Spain was actually a dormant seed finally watered after a long, cold Midwestern winter. This germination had fully set roots by the time I moved back, but I had no idea how I would even begin to consider medical school while carving out a life in Granada. These two lives felt diametrically opposed. Kids my age had fine-tuned their whole lives to go to med school. I had never shadowed anyone and was anxious about that lack of experience, and I wasn’t motivated to change that, deliberately kicking that can down the road till I found my dead end. I had done my research in laboratories on compounds I had little hope of scaling into a larger medical treatment (as if they’d give a sophomore that). As I failed on yet another Robinson annulation on the bench, I wondered if this was for me, and I was afraid to admit that a white coat was less appealing than chef’s whites. I was invested in learning how to bring part of Spain back with me, and cooking was the seed that flourished.

I distinctly remember my host mom gifting me a maybe four-ounce jar of peanut butter upon arriving at their home for the first time. Their family was accustomed to the often granola-minded K College student and had extended an olive branch, saying, “We know that this is important to you because over the years, this has been the only thing keeping students like you attached to us.” I could not have asked for a better host family experience. My host father loved teaching me expressions and explaining the meaning behind them. With a profound interest in etymology and a love of phrases myself, he showed me the encapsulated shreds of the underpinnings that made up Spanish identity over the years. He loved showing me fruit from around Spain, things I’d never had in the U.S., and which, looking back, were likely expensive and difficult to acquire in rural western Spain. Cherimoyas were my favorite.

My host siblings were always welcoming and still feel like long-lost cousins. My host mother was an incredible cook, and I still dream of her cocido cacereño. She was so patient with my toddler-level language skills. Never getting frustrated, always finding the humor in my bumbling twenty-year-old mind. She explained to me over time that students didn’t always like her cooking and would rely on peanut butter for tough nights. I could never understand that as she was an incredible scratch cook.

But her peanut butter was no Jif, the product I had grown up eating. It was “natural,” and I was artificial. My hydrogenated heart was made to withstand time and breakdown, never falling out of emulsion, sweet and salty, but a stranger in a foreign land. Natural peanut butter was never natural to my palate (that changed, but this isn’t that story), falling into two separate worlds of solids and lipids, something I didn’t have the mental or physical interest in combining.

By the time I had graduated, the sapling, nourished on memories of Spain and food, had poked its head out of the soil. The following two years of reading and cooking in Kalamazoo developed into such a tangle of foliage, it shaded out my med school plans and I dove head first into gastronomic grad school in San Sebastián.

Peanut butter was still hard to come by in those days, so when I came back to the U.S. for the holidays, I asked my mom to buy me Jif from Sam’s Club. Luckily, it fit in my backpack to bring back to the EU. I could finally show my United Nations of flatmates the peanut butter I had lamented was non-existent in Spain.

Returning home started off on the wrong foot as soon as I reached the airline’s front desk.

“Can I see your passport?”

My pockets emptied immediately, not even a coffee shop punch card in sight. My wallet and passport had fallen out in my parents’ car, into my oldest nemesis: the space between the console and my seat. Hands too thick to get a grip and fingers too weak to apply the pressure required to mechanical-claw it onto my lap. Thankfully, my parents found it and had barely left the terminal in Detroit before swinging back through to get it to me, safe and sound. Bags: checked.

As I made it through the millimeter scanner, my eyes rolled when I saw my backpack pulled aside. I was pretty used to this sort of affair. He asked about pointy objects and the like, and I told him to get after it. Arriving at the bottom of the bag, he said, “Aha, well this is the issue.”

“What? It’s just peanut butter. It’s not a liquid,” I stated, puzzled.

“You can’t have pastes either. If you want to grab your checked baggage, we can pack them. Otherwise, we need to confiscate them.”

I told him the jars were his, with a tone that said, “go fuck yourself.” I always used to imagine him and all the TSA agents in the break room eating my peanut butter, celebrating my ignorance. I now choose to believe that he kept it because he was a single father, benefiting from my stupidity by giving his nine kids sandwiches for a week.

Peanut butter became this shred of Americanness that felt approachable to others. It didn’t inherently carry nostalgia, but it was comfortable. A safe refuge for a hungry student when only bread or an apple was present (or just a clean-ish spoon, honestly). During the years I found myself abroad, it also tied me to home: to my time at my aunt’s house playing with my cousin, to high school lunches my dad dutifully packed each morning. It was a touchstone of America for me that wasn’t the blue-boxed mac and cheese that I deplored, or a hamburger and french fries that felt like an easy trope.

I was still babbling in the language of food, and when everything was excitingly foreign, peanut butter made sense. The comfort we derive from food, and the identity we develop alongside it, stays with us longer than we expect. We seek meaning and community through the textures, flavors, and experiences we know, and that will always feel like home.