Monday Musings

In my pantry, I have a fat, plastic baggie full of peanuts. In the shell.

Don’t ask me why or I’ll launch into an incredibly long, boring story about how my  mother is kind of a hoarder (of food and toilet paper) and how she continues to shop for me and my brother even though we are both grown people. It’s how she shows her love — through three extra bottles of ketchup, purchased on sale for 50 cents each.

Whenever we pop in for our regular bi-weekly dinner, she loads us up with groceries. So there you go — some brief backstory.

Anyway, one time my oldest child happened to nibble some peanuts in a bowl left out on the counter at my parents’ house. Now and ever since, my mom thinks peanuts are her favorite thing to eat in the whole wide world. Sadly, she is mostly indifferent to them — as is everyone in the house. But, we just received our second, Costco-sized bag of peanuts in recent months.

Every now and again, I’ll grab a handful of them and then immediately wonder why the hell I did that. The shell always splinters into bits that drift all over the floor, the papery outer coating gets stuck up high on a tooth and I then spend 5-12 minutes working to dislodge it. Or, I’ll split one open and half of the peanut flings out, only to be discovered later by a dog who then leaves it because she’s not even sure it’s something edible. It gets rejected by dogs who routinely lap up dead things. Not good marketing for the peanut.

So, do you see my point? In-the-shell peanuts are flat-out annoying. I prefer mine coated in nougat, caramel and chocolate with an easy-to-open plastic wrapper. Snickers style.

I mean, I get why you eat peanuts at baseball games — you need something to stay awake. But no one else in their right mind would snack on them. Worst packaging since oranges, says someone who routinely gets squirted in the eye and is tired of digging the white pith gunk out from under her nails.

I know this much, if desserts were packaged like peanuts and I had to bust through a stupid shell to get at the treat, I would lose so much weight.