Takin' Care of Business

We simply felt that there was not enough talk about peanut butter on this blog. Our peanut butter survey was not random. It was the product, and then catalyst, of hours of discussion. Many people ask Alisa and me if we ever fight. We do. About peanut butter.

So, way back in El Salvador we were asked to buy peanut butter for the sandwiches of the study abroad students. I picked out 3 creamy and 1 crunchy because, even though I believe crunchy to be the far superior of the two, I thought that the majority of people liked creamy. Alisa then made a bold claim. She told us that she was absolutely certain that most women liked creamy and that most men liked crunchy. She later tempered her prediction to a 60-40 split. She was convinced that 60% of women liked creamy and that 60% of men liked crunchy. I thought this was absurd and so we immediately began asking every person we met how they felt about this great life mystery.

We were both amazed by the results and also by all of the new questions the discussions raised.

It became immediately clear that the majority of men and women liked crunchy, not creamy, leaving Alisa and I both to question our previously understood realities. Alisa, a lover of creamy and a member of a family in which the women like creamy and the man likes crunchy, realized that she had always assumed that what she experienced was the same as what everyone else experienced. I realized that rather than place myself in the majority like Alisa, I liked to put myself in the place of the minority. I was happy to think of myself as one of the few who truly understood how good crunchy peanut butter was. I had to accept that I had been in the majority all along.

Those outside the gender binary was the only group to go for creamy. What could this possibly mean? Those outside the gender binary are by definition an ambiguous group from the start. And did people vote in this category because they personally identify outside the binary or because they believe their peanut butter preference to be non-gendered?

Further questions:
Is a person who likes creamy unwilling to eat crunchy, whereas a person who likes crunchy willing to eat either? Like with orange juice, the pulp person will swing both ways, but the no-pulp person is a purist.
Is peanut butter preference culturally specific? Is age a factor?
Are there trends with these groups? If presented with "left or right," "curvy or straight," and "wheat or white," will the crunchy person go for left, curvy, and wheat?

Feel free to weigh in . . .