Chunky Peanut Butter Vs. Smooth Peanut Butter: Spreadable Smackdown!

First, to give credit where credit is due, it was in the comment stream to this product review that the necessity of this smooth versus chunky treatise was made apparent to me. The lord works, as they say, in mysterious ways--trite but true... that his/her/its/their plan for me would be revealed via Bridgitte's Skippy reduced fat smooth peanut butter review is an unexpected yet nonetheless welcome twist of kismet. With humble candor, my life has lacked purpose of late. A white light washes over me, warms me, gives me fortitude to be the peanutty prophet for whom you've been waiting.

In a war-torn, forlorn, crazy world of destruction, death, despair, and looming doom, it's understandably easy to lose sight of what really matters: namely, a resolution to the fiercely divisive, long-raging debate over which is the superior product--chunky peanut butter or smooth peanut butter.

Peanut butter. You can practically taste it as you savor its assonance and consonance. Grand and glutinous, deep taupe.

But while some of you imagine crunching chunky peanut butter, others entertain swirling visions of the smooth butter-stuff. Which is the better butter--who's right? "Can't we all be right?" I can hear some of you chirp. "Smooth or chunky, it's opinion, isn't it?" No and no. Basic physics, my legume-loving disciples, has taught us that no two peanut butter varieties can occupy the same slot in a product ranking.

It was philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau who first wrote about the topic at hand (with an awesome foresight, at more than a century prior to recorded peanut butter history). He proposed that peanut butter is born innately chunky, and that it is society that over-pulverizes it, making it smooth. It's impossible to dismiss--with minimal observation, one can certainly see that a peanut is indeed a little chunk. It is only in the processing, the conversion to a full-grown, fully-functioning butter, that a peanut is ever rendered smooth.

Some will use this logic to claim that smooth peanut butter is, therefore, the fully-realized product, and hence superior. Not so. The implication of such an assertion is that the content of a product, its flavor, its enjoyablitity, its very soul, is improved by becoming entirely removed from its nature. I ask--would you want orange juice that retained no tie to its original orangeness? Of course not (and this is why orange juice with pulp is preferable to that with none--but let's save that for another article). The point is that it is the presence of chunks in chunky peanut butter that keeps it authentic.

We, as mortal beings, understand the drive toward immortality, to leave behind a lingering trace of ourselves; we strive to change the world, we have children, we build monuments, we create works of art. Dwell for a moment on the sentimental pang that resonates in thoughts of our transience, both individual and collective. Now consider that it requires, on average, 810 peanuts to make an 18 ounce jar of peanut butter. Just over half of the entire U.S. peanut crop is used to make peanut butter. Is it right for us to thoroughly mash away and obliterate all trace of these peanuts when we produce our peanut butter? Or, rather, can our sympathies lead us to allow small peanut morsels to remain, to be remembered, to be appreciated during mastication? Don't we all strive just a little bit each day to be a peanut chunk in a vast homogenous sea of peanut goo?

The texture of life. Whether it be found in the anomalous events that shake us briefly awake from our daily somnambulist drudgery, or simply between two slices of bread, sweetly co-existing with some jelly, it is the evidence we need to remind us who we are. That we are. The choice between chunky and smooth carries with it supreme ramifications.

Supermarket shelves offer us a quintessential option (or at least, the purported 8 out of 10 of us who purchase peanut butter). Chunky or smooth peanut butter? You must choose wisely. It is only in the former that we find affirmation of all that is good in us and our mess of a world. I call on all who've sinned with the latter to repent. 10 Hail Chunkies.

Let us use the provided comment stream to show how strong our chunky faith is, buttery brethren. Take up thy knives to help spread the good peanutty word over the bread of ignorance, and be sure to proselytize to save the non-believer here.