Oily Glop

Glop:  Not in Webster's, which infuriates me.  It's a good word and a pretty funny one at that.


One of my Be Good To Myself Because I’m Worth It, Doggone It! goals in recovery has been to eat better.  At the beginning this could be translated as “Eat, Period.”  I couldn’t be bothered to eat much solid food that didn’t fall into the donut category when I was still working on my lead.  Food harshed my buzz and I was all about the buzz.  Plus, I figure I was drinking 1500 to 2000 calories of pure glucose each day (beer calories = glucose calories) and this helped to polish the rough edges off my appetite.

Once I managed to work my way through the early Kraft macaroni and cheese or 3 bowls of Cap’n Crunch cereal phase – not impressive but an improvement over not eating at all – I dipped my toe into non-packaged foodstuffs like fruits and vegetables.  Occasionally I even go organic, but the German peasant in my mostly rebels at the cost and inconvenience.  

Anyway, because I don’t eat much meat I suck down a lot of peanut butter.  Good old Skippy or Jif, full of sugar and partially hydrogenated vegetable oil.  I’ve always wondered why the good folks at Skippy didn’t just go ahead and use fully hydrogenated vegetable oil.  It sounds like a wonderful marketing ploy to me: “New and Improved Skippy – now with FULLY hydrogenated vegetable oil.”

Because I consume so much partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, which sounds somewhat menacing and not all that good for me, although I don’t know why, I once bought some organic or “natural” peanut butter.  If I worked at Skippy or even Jif I’d be a little defensive about this – it implies that their product is unnatural, which adds to the overtone of menace, not a good adjective to have associated with your product.  I try natural foods from time to time.  I’m not a fanatic about the practice; I’ll stick with the natural brand if the taste is acceptable and the price premium isn’t too objectionable.  The natural stuff is often a lot more expensive.  I thought things like partially hydrogenated vegetable oils were added to the product.  It’s unclear to me why the removal of ingredients would increase the cost but there you go.

The peanut butter experiment was a failure.  Apparently the partially hydrogenated vegetable oil and the highly processed and refined white sugar adds a lot of flavor.  Imagine that.   Plus, the non-hydrogenated vegetable oil separates from the peanut part, leaving the consumer with an inconvenient, gloppy, oily mess that has to be manually stirred together to produce the spreadable peanut butter that I so love to eat.  So I returned to Jif.  Or Skippy.  Whatever’s on sale. 

Editor’s Note: When Jif was first introduced the Jif mascot was the “Jifaroo.”  No word yet on what type of animal this was.

Jifaroo, Jif Peanut Butter, 1950's

Editor’s Updated Note: The Jifaroo is a blue kangaroo type animal, partially clad, in motion, ecstatically happy.  It’s an active trademark of the Procter and Gamble Company so I would NOT screw with it.

The point here, which I've almost totally forgotten about, is that I was at a warehouse club that SuperK and I belong to.  I noticed that they were carrying a new organic peanut butter.  The only available container for this product could best be described as a 55 gallon drum.  It was big.

I grabbed one and inspected it.

“Don’t buy that,” SuperK said.  “You don’t like it.”

“I’m going to try one,” I said.  “It looks good.  It’ll be different this time.”

“Look at all the oil on top already,” she pointed out. 

Yesterday I cracked the seal on the top of the drum.  I take a sandwich with me to my 8AM meeting.  I eat all the time.  I rarely stop eating.  I’m eating right now.  I get pissy if I don’t eat pretty often.  I plunged a big wooden spoon into the oily, gloppy mess, which was filled right to the top of the container.  A fair amount of oily glop ran down the side of the drum even though I didn’t get any effective stirring done.  I stirred some more and some more glop overflowed.  I decided to spoon a bunch of the peanut butter into a separate plastic container so I could free up some stirring room.  This was mostly effective in transferring the gloppy oil onto the counter and all over the second container.

It went on like this for a while.  I’m now late for the meeting because of all of the stirring and transferring.  I'm angry now.  I'm also anal retentive so I couldn't leave before cleaning up the oil glop, famously resistant to wiping up, what with all the oil.  I'm rushing so I forget to put on the honey, which is the most important part of the sandwich, except for the bread which you really need to transport the peanut butter and honey.


I choked down the sandwich.  It was dry and fairly tasteless.


Beware the glop.