One Great American Sandwich That Proves Everything Was Better 50 Years Ago
I mean, c'mon, we don't need progress. Let's go back to the PB&J days when America was great.
The first thing I learned to cook was a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Oh man, there was nothing better than being first to the jar of peanut butter. Opening that jar of Skippy and stabbing the smooth surface with a table knife. Scoop it out. Spread it. Tear up the bread a little in the process. Get peanut butter up the handle of the knife, on my hands, fingers. Just heaven.
American kids ate PB&J’s. The average kid ate about 1,500 PB&Js before they graduated high school. That’s a tradition. Forget American As Apple Pie. American is a PB&J.
But that was the good ‘ole days. Modern society has done its best to take the fun out of a PB&J. Why can’t we just leave a good thing alone.
Bread then and bread now
We used Wonder Bread. C’mon. Wonder was an innovator. They were one of the first to figure out how to actually slice their loaf of bread. Pre-sliced bread! Sure, it seems like a no-brainer now but back in the 20’s and 30’s it was revolutionary.
But slicing bread created some problems. Solve one problem and another pops up. Sliced bread didn’t last as long. It went stale much faster than those old chunks of bread that were mostly protected by their crust. So we added preservatives and enriched the flour and since we were taking all the stuff that had flavor out, we added sugar. Lots of sugar. Five different types of sugar.
How’s that for value?
Traditionally, bread had three ingredients; flour, water, and salt. Maybe some yeast if you weren’t working from your sourdough starter. That’s it. I mean, Wonder Bread has at least 10 ingredients. That’s more for your money.
Plus with all the sugar, food manufacturers needed to create a special ingredient. Sugar was expensive. So, being the creative, innovative guys they all knew they were, they created High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFC). It was cheap and sweet and loaded with fructose. This was American ingenuity at its finest.
A whole new industry was born. We knew how to drive the economy. More HFC, please. Farmers will benefit. Doctors will benefit. Gotta have someone to tell parents their kids are fat. We’ll need a Presidential physical fitness council. That’s a few more new jobs.
Snacks become more addictive.
We’ll eat more processed foods because if bread is better for you with more fake sugar then why not add it to everything?
Inflammation rages. Everyone is happy.
Today, I go to the store and see a vast sea of bread. I can easily buy bakery bread right at the supermarket. They even have bread I have to slice myself. Bread with three ingredients. Bread with seeds that get all over the place when you open the bag.
Lots of choices. I don’t need choices. Just give me the bread that manufacturing companies developed to improve their bottom line. That was the American way.
I want pre-sliced bread with tons of ingredients and fake sugar just like it was 50 years ago.
Peanut Butter Then and Peanut Butter Now
When I was a kid you ate Skippy or Jif. Sure, some people ate exotic peanut butters like Peter Pan, but we were a Skippy family. Peanut butter was a simple product when originally developed by the Incas. You took a peanut and you ground it up. That was it. It stayed that way for a long time. Simple.
No way was that going to work. We set about making it better.
Peanut butter had some drawbacks. The oil in the nuts, when ground up, had a tendency to separate when stored. Meaning, you had to stir it up all by yourself. That was messy. And it required more work for the consumer. So we applied our American can-do attitude and we hydrogenated the entire messy goop. This is a chemical process that pumps hydrogen into our peanut butter. It was called PHO peanut butter — except by those crafty marketers that just called it peanut butter — and 50 years ago.
It outsold natural peanut butter.
Of course, pumping in hydrogen replaced some of the healthy fats with trans fats. Made the stuff stickier and it didn’t separate. Easy peasy. No more tortuous stirring. But without all the healthy fats it didn’t taste quite as good so we squeezed in some sugar.
Today, you can get peanut butter with one ingredient. Just one. Peanuts. How is that better? Peanut butter 50 years ago was backed by the food industry. It tasted better, lasted longer, and you didn’t have to stir it up. Plus it had more ingredients and was made using a chemical process.
I’ll stay with sweet, stick-to-the-roof-of-your-mouth, smooth paste that tastes oh so good.
Jelly Then and Now
We got Welch’s Grape Jelly. Everyone got Welch’s Grape Jelly. Jelly is simple stuff. Take your grapes and add water. Smash and boil. Strain and cool. Next day throw it in a pot, add sugar, add some pectin (it’s the soluble fiber found in fruit. It makes it all jelly-like), and boil it. Then just let it cool and stick it in some jars. And presto, you got jelly.
But 50 years ago we needed more sugar. We were used to stuff being sweeter and sweeter. Even fruit, which is basically pure sugar, needed more sugar. So we added HFC. You know that fake, super-sweet, cheap stuff that comes from corn. We made the jelly sweeter. And we made it cheaper for the manufacturers.
Today, there are so many choices of jellies it scares me. How is it possible to have jelly from every type of fruit known to humans? It’s too much. I don’t want a shelf full of ‘natural’ jellies. I want Welch’s with corn syrup added.
That’s how we did it 50 years ago.
Make a PB&J with your kids today
We don’t want innovations, healthier foods, or more choices. We want our foods stirred for us. That’s the way we did it when we were younger. We turned out ok.
Make a sandwich with your kids. Teach them the right way. You can still find the ‘good’ stuff if you search.
Nothing says America like a good PB&J.
Hoorah.
Think about it…
Someone asked me the other day what I thought the best era of history to live in was. I said it’s right now, obviously. It’s the best time in history to be alive. Doesn’t mean there aren’t problems. There certainly are. And they are huge, existential problems.
But we have more opportunities. More tools to work with. More connections between different societies. More freedoms. More books to read.
You have food to eat. Or to give. You can help.
Income is greater. People live longer.
The path is always forward. Not backward.
Remember, solve one problem and the next problem arises. Just keep solving.
Do it…
Watch it: The Old Man: Season 2 - Season 1 was surprisingly great. I hadn’t heard anything about it and kinda stumbled across it. Can’t wait to see Season 2. It’s Jeff Bridges. It’s John Lithgow. It’s Alia Shawkat. Lots of twist and suspense in Season 1.
NFL Games - Only 9.59% of teams that go 0 -2 make the playoffs. There are some seasons on the line.
Want to go to a theater? Try The Killer’s Game.
Read it: Tim Denning Substack that got me up a little earlier this week. And this Walter Rhein Article. It’s brave. It’s honest. And it caused me a moment of reflection and thought. And I’m powering through and scribbling in and highlighting blurbs of: The Expectation Effect.
Quote it:
The mind is its own place and in it self
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.
- John Milton, Paradise Lost
Let the thinking begin.
If you want to check out some great reading list and see which books have influenced, surprised, educated, and entertained me, check out my book shop here. The lists grow monthly and I don’t recommend any books I haven’t personally read. Or use my book recommendation engine and specific author chatbots. Check it out. It’s fun.