After my mother dreamt that the cow she was eating was her own mother, bovine eyes terrified and crying, we went vegetarian. Tofu, tempeh, and seitan had yet to catch on in Atlanta, so she replaced our 8-ounce reusable container for bulk grind-your-own crunchy peanut butter with a 16-ounce jar.
Creamy peanut butter epitomized the normal life I just knew was better. Jif’s predictably standard smell represented clothes bought from the Gap, not stitched together interior design scraps my mother salvaged from work. With Jif, I could match other girls on “twin day,” not just blend in with some stranger’s curtains. Peter Pan peanut butter’s orangutan-sacrificing palm oil smoothness was like Saturdays at 6 Flags. How I begged for the spread pre-packaged in some mysterious distant factory, and vacations to Myrtle Beach instead of the annual trip to visit family in California. Skippy’s cane sugar echoing Caribbean-exploitation was the sweet inauthenticity of families for whom Mexican food meant Taco Bell, not the tortillas my mother squished on the cast iron press she brought back from our first trip home.
When we moved to Georgia, no one at school knew what avocados or artichokes were. But the Dekalb farmer’s market had masa harina for tortillas (the brand with gold letters rimmed in green), a multilingual staff, and produce I wouldn’t identify until I came to Taiwan and saw street vendors hawking bouquets of longan or roasting the buffalo-head shaped chestnuts. The market also had a peanut butter grinder. Watching peanuts slowly churn in the plexiglass vat, then snaking out in two thick ribbons, was meditative. But Katie across the street pouted at her toast, incredulous that this was real peanut butter, so I too doubted the veracity of unbranded peanut butter. What even is food without lists of ingredients and nutritional information? My mother said the labels lied, leaving out the insects and rodents that fell into the vats of peanut butter, along with the occasional worker’s finger sliced off by industrial blades. At least when Ms. Eguaroje had us plant peanut vines in ninth grade biology, I could watch the bugs burrowing into the pods.
Now that I am grown, I could live in suburban America, shop at the Gap, and eat drive-through Taco Bell. But at my local grocery, I reach past the creamy imported Skippy to the golden Mandarin characters on a red label: Hsinchu peanut butter, crunchy.
L. Acadia is a lit professor at National Taiwan University, a dog pillow at home, and can otherwise be found searching Taipei for ghosts and vegan treats. L. has a PhD from Berkeley. Their creative writing can be found in Autostraddle, Neon Door, New Orleans Review, and elsewhere. Connect with L. Acadia on Twitter/X and Instagram @acadialogue.
Featured Artwork:
Blurred Dreams
Susan L. Lin is a Taiwanese American storyteller who hails from southeast Texas. She has an MFA in Writing from California College of the Arts. Her novella GOODBYE TO THE OCEAN won the 2022 Etchings Press novella prize, and her short prose and poetry have appeared in over fifty different publications. Find more at her website.