Standing Up For Peanuts

Dear peanuts,

You have always been there for me and I'll be damned if I'm going to turn my back on you now.

Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. Friendly's Reese's Peanut Butter Cup sundaes. Butterfingers. Funny Bones. Those orange cracker peanut butter sandwiches. Peanut M & M's. Reese's Crispy Crunchy's. Whatchamacallit's.

My chemically altered peanut byproduct-rich diet probably has sustained me throughout my life. It has nourished me. My grade school lunchtime Funny Bones gave me that little extra bit of pep I needed to ensure that I was on my game at recess, pegging the kids that were too uncoordinated to catch the tennis ball and too chubby to make it to the wall in time to avoid my Funny Bone-powered fastball.

Peanut butter was an essential part of my lifestyle in college. Peanut butter went on everything in college- bagels, English muffins, toast, mushrooms, visiting high school seniors yearning for that indefinable "college experience" that some would nonetheless define as an intimate rendezvous involving peanut butter, whipped cream, Jagermeister, the abandonment of virtue and the feigned ignorance of the laws of the fine state of Connecticut.

Even now, in the real world, I still need the occasional midmorning Peanut M & M fix, lunchtime Coldstone Creamery Peanut Butter Perfection sundae, midafternoon Butterfinger and end of the day bowl of Peanut Butter Toast Crunch cereal to get me through the 9-5 drudgery.

How empty my life would be without peanuts. Take away my Reese's Peanut Butter Cups and I might as well be living in Darfur. Except it would be way worse than Darfur. Because not only would there be genocide and unspeakable acts of personal tragedy but there also wouldn't be any peanut butter to soothe my soul or barter for desperately-needed medical supplies. You can't spell "genocide" without "no peanut butter." More or less.

But now, my friend, you are under attack. Because you, brave little peanut, are apparently out to destroy humanity. You are too powerful for a human child's immune system. Some overactive parents now believe that merely saying the word "peanut" in a hospital or day care center will result in the deaths of every child under the age of 35. And if you bring any peanut-related product into a kindergarten classroom, well, prepare to be scrubbing cute, little body parts off the ceiling because it's going to be a baby bloodbath.

One minute, those precious toddlers are playing with blocks and the next it's carnage and intestines and poop and screaming and hellish nightmares for the rest of your life.

I will be honest- the peanut allergy doomsday scenario baffles me. Haven't peanuts been around for a long, long, long time? I'm no plant scientist, or botanist if you will, but as far as I know, peanuts were not invented in 1997. If I remember correctly, Matthew McConaghey beat out a crowded field including Vivica A. Fox, Courtney Love, Renee Zellwegger and Ewan McGregor to win the 1997 MTV Movie Award for Best Breakthrough Performance. Peanuts weren't even nominated so I think I'm right when I say that this whole peanuts thing has been around for a few years.

So why are kids just now being massacred by the unholy armies of Mr. Peanut?

Because their parents are a bunch of pussies, technically speaking.

How much do some of these outrageous parents suck? It's become so ridiculous that now some parents are claiming that the odor of peanuts is enough to kill their destined-for-a-clock-tower offspring. That's right. The smell of peanuts is bad/strong/toxic enough to kill. For the first time in recorded history, the mere smell of a food product can kill you.

Take a minute to think about that. In the four centuries that my fellow white European interlopers have been ransacking America, our ancestors chowed down on raw meat, slept in beds that were bordered by canals of sewage, drank from water sources clogged with rotting carcasses, drawn in full breaths of nasty, polluted urban air and by God, our ancestors may have even rolled the dice and eaten some peanuts. And somehow we have survived and flourished.

But in 2007, merely smelling a scent that sorta resembles a peanut will kill a child.

I'm calling bullshit.

I realize that some kids actually have peanut allergies. I believe that their scientific name is "suckes tobeyouis."

But the rest of these kids aren't allergic to peanuts. It's just impossible. How do we go from being a species that can devour peanuts and all the tasty peanut-offshoots and live to tell about it to being a species that has to ban all peanut-products from schools out of fear that a rogue Reese's will garrote a group of fourth graders? It's preposterous. Parents are just being absurd and it has to stop.

Because peanuts are just the beginning. If someone can find something wrong with peanuts- which actually have some nutritional value when they're not busy eviscerating you and banging your recently widowed wife- then how easy will it be for them to find something wrong with cheese? Cheese is awesome. Cheeseburgers, nacho cheese, spray cheese, Cheetos- the list is endless. But if they can go after peanut butter, what would stop them from going after cheese?

Would McDonalds have to build hermitically sealed domes around each of its restaurants, with air-tight chambers for entry and exit, in order to guarantee that not one whiff of deadly cheese scent would waft from its kitchen and cut down a bunch of cherubic youngsters playing video games in their protective pod suits?

Peanuts, you have my word; I will never abandon you. No matter how many neurotic, goofball parents try to take you down, I will be there to fight them off. Pretty easily I might add- because they'll be so malnourished from eating such a bland, totally lacking in kickass peanut products diet.

A world without Reese's Peanut Butter Cups- I'm pretty sure that's what John was writing about in Revelations. No Reese's = the apocalypse.

Yours in solidarity,

Jamie