Thursday food 'nooooo:' P.B. Slices

Finally, someone has made peanut butter easy to eat. But wait — was it difficult to eat in the first place?

Thu, Mar 05 2009 at 12:17 AM EST

Welcome to the Thursday food "nooooo." That's "nooooo" as in "no way", "no they didn't", or "no one in their right mind would buy that."

As if peanut butter wasn’t scary enough at the moment, I come across this little gem while traveling the information highway, P.B. Slices. Slices of some peanut butter like substance that looks like brown Kraft cheese singles.

The website says “P.B. Slices makes peanut butter easy to eat.” Huh? Since when is sticking a knife or spoon in a jar of peanut butter difficult?

Here’s the story of the creation of the P.B. Slices.

When he came up with the idea for sliced peanut butter during an evening with friends, Stewart Kennedy knew he would have to find a way to make peanut butter "unsticky." Creating P.B. Slices™ took Kennedy, president of Kennedy Foods, more than four years, thousands of feet of plastic cling wrap and countless samples hanging from his kitchen cabinets. In the end, diligence paid off as P.B. Slices has become one of the hottest products on the market.

So thousands of feet of plastic cling wrap ended up in the landfills for this?

I compared the nutrition information on the P.B. Slices website with the back of my natural peanut butter jar, and most of the information was comparable (the serving size is different, so it’s not an exact comparison). However, there is no list of ingredients on the site, and nowhere on the site does it say that P.B. Slices are natural or all natural, two buzz words they would certainly use if they could. We're left to draw our own conclusions about the ingredients, and those conclusions aren't good. Exactly what is it they put in the slices to keep their shape?

These P.B. Slices are simply a “nooooo.” Overly processed, overly packaged and just one more step toward making our food totally unrecognizable from its humble beginnings.

Image: P.B. Slices website