Friday, August 25, 2006

It's a Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich!

There was a time, before Martha Stewart made people ashamed over putting together meals that were too simple, when a parent would satisfy a hungry child by putting together a simple peanut butter and jelly sandwich. It was always an easy fallback when anything else might have taken more time to prepare, or special items were missing from the cupboard.

And in many families before a child was old enough to learn how to boil water, the child could learn how to spread the ingredients and make a PB&J for himself or herself.

Tonight when I was picking up a few groceries at the supermarket, I saw this:

frozen premade PB&J sandwiches


It is a package of frozen pre-made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. At the sale price of two packages for $5, a two ounce frozen sandwich costs 62.5 cents. And there seems to be a market for it.

Have we come to this? Is there such a shortage of time in modern life that neither a parent, nor a caregiver, nor a child can make a humble PB&J?

I am still stunned.


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4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Even Laurel (she's 2) has made herself a peanut butter sandwich. While I was busy with something else, she got out the bread, the peanut butter, a knife (no, not a sharp one) and managed to spread some peanut butter onto the bread. She was very proud of her creation and ate the whole thing. Maybe she could get a job making peanut butter sandwiches...

Stewart said...

We all know Laurel is a bright girl, but how is she going to fit into this brave new world where "making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich" means putting a factory-produced frozen pastry into the microwave to defrost it?

Anonymous said...

The sad part I think is that most people have gotten lazy when it comes to cooking and look for the easy way out, and todays market seems to reflect heavanily upon pre-made foods. I guess people simply don't have the time anymore. As for me and my kids we much rather make our own PB&J.

Anonymous said...

I bet there is a lot of chemicals and preservatives that go into that. I honestly think by the time you take the frozen pastry out of the freezer and defrost it in the microwave you may as well went ahead and made the traditional PB&J.