The Peanut Butter Debate

I am a big believer in "waste not, want not." I'd I don't think I quite follow that line of reasoning all the way into the realms of hoarding, but I will admit that there is a bag of old t-shirts and other miscellaneous items of clothing that I no longer wear sitting out in my hallway because I can't bring myself to throw these away. However, I also haven't gotten around to donating them anywhere, so . . . there they sit.

On the other hand, if I am in need of a spare paper clip, twisty tie, push pin, Post-It note, or other arbitrary article of office supplies, I have an entire box that I have dragged with me since freshman year of college "just in case" I might be doing some crafty project for which I need office supplies. So while I wasn't a boy scout (or a girl scout--I never "graduated" from brownies), my penchant for saving things does come in handy once in a while.

Which all brings me to a recent debate between me and my boyfriend R___  over, of all things, a jar of peanut butter.

Our financial/food arrangement is that I buy the groceries, and he pays for meals when we go out to eat. Therefore, when he runs out of something, he tells me to buy it, and I do. Recently he's been on a peanut butter kick, so when he told me he had run out of peanut butter and should I buy more, I took him at his word and bought another container. When I brought it home and went to put it in its rightful place, I picked up the "empty" container and found that it weighed an awful lot for being empty. Unscrewing the lid, I discovered that this jar was far from empty. There was plenty of peanut butter left in there, if only someone would bother to scrape it out with a spatula.

I informed R___ of this excelent spatula strategy, since he had clearly not considered it, but to my great surprise, instead of applauding my ingenuity, he responded, "What? You opened the lid? That molecule of peanut butter must have floated away!" I thought surely he was joking, and that in the next instant he would be in the kitchen, scraping away at the inside of that jar, but he maintained that there was no more than a single molecule of peanut butter left, and that I was foolish to even consider trying to get it out of the jar.

Well, at long last, I took it upon myself to scrape out that jar, and now I bring the debate to you, my good, unbiased readers. Consider the images below:

Jar, pre-scraping, containing "One Single Molecule" of peanut butter

"Molecule" of peanut butter scraped from jar

Jar, post-scraping and ready for the trash

I am now asking you, my readers, to judge. Please cast your vote below:

Create your free online surveys with SurveyMonkey , the world's leading questionnaire tool.