okieinexile
Well-Known Member
Peanut butter and honey
By Bobby Neal Winters
The French have a saying—and I don’t know the original French version of it, so I don’t know why I am even bringing it up—but what it says translated is, “There is no accounting for taste.” I don’t wonder that they would have discovered this in a place where they eat snails, but I am sort of backward anyway.
At my house, I have been stymied in my desire to teach my daughters the wonders of peanut butter and honey. I was introduced to this delight so early I can’t remember, but I’m pretty sure it was my dad that did the introducing. Given my daughters’ collective negative reaction, I’ve got to conclude peanut butter and honey are two of those flavors that people can’t successfully mix in their heads and get an accurate representation of the product. Or maybe my daughters really just don’t like it. Maybe they are French and need to imagine the mixture over a snail or something. C’est la vie.
Honey is one of God’s wonders. First you have to have bees. They are wondrous enough by themselves. They live in homes filled with wax that has been shaped into little hexagons. They fly all around stealing nectar from flowers and depositing it back into the wax hexagons. I don’t know what’s harder to believe that they build hexagons from wax, that they gather nectar, or that we like eating what is essentially bee spit.
On the other hand, there is peanut butter. For those of you who don’t already know it, Peanuts are not nuts at all. They are legumes (a French word again) like beans and black-eyed peas, but they grow underground. George Washington Carver took these nuts that aren’t nuts and figured out how to turn them into everything from cooking oil to thermonuclear missiles. Peanut butter is somewhere halfway between those two. There are those of us who would be of the opinion that peanut butter is one of the highest achievements of Man.
The mixing of peanut butter and honey brings something new into existence. There is a new thing that is better than either of its constituents and is more in combination than the sum of the constituent parts. It reveals to us a mystery.
All of this came to me while I was sitting at a wedding last Saturday night. As much as we might hate to admit it, it is hard to go to wedding after wedding, listen to the things the preacher says, and not eventually learn something. This was a Baptist wedding, but it in listening to the pastor’s message, I kept thinking of the Catholic idea of marriage as one of the sacraments, which are defined as “outward signs of inward grace”. God’s grace is somehow revealed with a marriage.
Each member of the couple comes to the marriage as a separate individual, and after the marriage, that individual is part of a larger whole. There is something there which wasn’t there before, something which is greater than the sum of the separate parts.
It is as if when God does the arithmetic one and one is greater than two. As a mathematician, I know that doesn’t make sense, but, having seen it with my own eyes, I must live with the paradox. In fact, by contemplating that paradox, I might stumble upon a greater truth.
It may be the sum is greater when the differences between the two are greater. After all, honey and honey is just more honey, and peanut butter piled on peanut butter adds nothing new to the universe.
On the other hand, there must be some compatibility or the disparate things will remain distinct. Honey and gravel don’t make a good mixture, nor do peanut butter and cement. There is, however, a subtle sweetness within the peanut butter which is accentuated by the honey. There are undertones within the taste of the honey which survive the strength of the peanut butter.
Yet my daughters do not believe the mixture would be palatable. There are some things which only time and experience can remedy. One day they will know, but in the meantime, I eat my peanut butter and honey alone, and that’s no good because it is like life. It is better when shared.
By Bobby Neal Winters
The French have a saying—and I don’t know the original French version of it, so I don’t know why I am even bringing it up—but what it says translated is, “There is no accounting for taste.” I don’t wonder that they would have discovered this in a place where they eat snails, but I am sort of backward anyway.
At my house, I have been stymied in my desire to teach my daughters the wonders of peanut butter and honey. I was introduced to this delight so early I can’t remember, but I’m pretty sure it was my dad that did the introducing. Given my daughters’ collective negative reaction, I’ve got to conclude peanut butter and honey are two of those flavors that people can’t successfully mix in their heads and get an accurate representation of the product. Or maybe my daughters really just don’t like it. Maybe they are French and need to imagine the mixture over a snail or something. C’est la vie.
Honey is one of God’s wonders. First you have to have bees. They are wondrous enough by themselves. They live in homes filled with wax that has been shaped into little hexagons. They fly all around stealing nectar from flowers and depositing it back into the wax hexagons. I don’t know what’s harder to believe that they build hexagons from wax, that they gather nectar, or that we like eating what is essentially bee spit.
On the other hand, there is peanut butter. For those of you who don’t already know it, Peanuts are not nuts at all. They are legumes (a French word again) like beans and black-eyed peas, but they grow underground. George Washington Carver took these nuts that aren’t nuts and figured out how to turn them into everything from cooking oil to thermonuclear missiles. Peanut butter is somewhere halfway between those two. There are those of us who would be of the opinion that peanut butter is one of the highest achievements of Man.
The mixing of peanut butter and honey brings something new into existence. There is a new thing that is better than either of its constituents and is more in combination than the sum of the constituent parts. It reveals to us a mystery.
All of this came to me while I was sitting at a wedding last Saturday night. As much as we might hate to admit it, it is hard to go to wedding after wedding, listen to the things the preacher says, and not eventually learn something. This was a Baptist wedding, but it in listening to the pastor’s message, I kept thinking of the Catholic idea of marriage as one of the sacraments, which are defined as “outward signs of inward grace”. God’s grace is somehow revealed with a marriage.
Each member of the couple comes to the marriage as a separate individual, and after the marriage, that individual is part of a larger whole. There is something there which wasn’t there before, something which is greater than the sum of the separate parts.
It is as if when God does the arithmetic one and one is greater than two. As a mathematician, I know that doesn’t make sense, but, having seen it with my own eyes, I must live with the paradox. In fact, by contemplating that paradox, I might stumble upon a greater truth.
It may be the sum is greater when the differences between the two are greater. After all, honey and honey is just more honey, and peanut butter piled on peanut butter adds nothing new to the universe.
On the other hand, there must be some compatibility or the disparate things will remain distinct. Honey and gravel don’t make a good mixture, nor do peanut butter and cement. There is, however, a subtle sweetness within the peanut butter which is accentuated by the honey. There are undertones within the taste of the honey which survive the strength of the peanut butter.
Yet my daughters do not believe the mixture would be palatable. There are some things which only time and experience can remedy. One day they will know, but in the meantime, I eat my peanut butter and honey alone, and that’s no good because it is like life. It is better when shared.
