By DAVID IZRAELEVITZ
Los Alamos
 
One of my fellow labmates in graduate school ate a peanut-butter and jelly sandwich for lunch every day.

I thought this was extremely weird, even if my claim to a more diverse diet was based on felafel wraps, subs and frito pies.

The weirdness was not only his devotion to this particular sandwich, but rather I thought peanut butter and jelly was a disgusting combination, something akin to spreading green pea puree on jelly-covered crackers. As you might guess, there was no peanut butter in my native Uruguay.

It was not until I entered fatherhood and was informed by my better half that PB&J is actually a healthy, protein-filled snack that I started making it for our toddler when lunch duty called.

I admit that I was driven as much by laziness and lack of imagination as by nutritional value, but eventually, those crusty remains beckoned to me to finish, and like allergy shots that eventually make you accustomed to some insult to your body, I started first conceding PB&J as an acceptable meal, and eventually seeing its merits.

Allow me then to list these merits:

You can make another easy, healthy snack in a few seconds that also includes a vegetable as a bonus. “Ants on a log” thus transformed me from a lazy Dad into a thoughtful, nurturing provider.
PB is an edible cement that keeps a sandwich from crumbling in the bottom of your backpack.

If you think of Merit #3, please let me know.

The spread that held the equivalent position in the toddler menu in Uruguay, was dulce de leche, essentially caramelized sugar dissolved in milk, which results in a substance of similar color and consistency to smooth PB, but without any possible analogy to pureed peas.

I had a dulce de leche sandwich often as a child (OK, everyday, but absolutely no relevance to paragraph #1), and when I brought it to lunch in high school, those around my table took tastes of this exotic repast, but now it has entered the American consciousness.

We have dulce de leche ice cream, dulce de leche cheesecake, Sonic dulce de leche shakes, and I am sure soon enough, dulce de leche infused kale.

However, there is no need to pollute dulce de leche with any adulteration. It is something worth scooping a spoonful out of a jar and licking it like a lolli-pop.

This is something I did starting at the age of five and ending sometime in the future when I no longer have a tongue.

I read somewhere that smell is our most primal sense, and I suspect our sense of taste is not far behind. It makes sense that eating certain foods help us recall some pleasant childhood memories.

I feel awful that my children might taste raisins on a peanut butter covered celery stick as reminisce about a tender youth, when I should have handed them a spoonful of dulce de leche instead when the memory-forming occasion called.

I guess that’s what grandkids are for, to permit us to correct those parenting errors committed in our youth. I have the spoonful of dulce de leche ready to serve, if I don’t finish it first.