The Old Coot is down on PB&J

I watched a celebrity chef on daytime TV demonstrate how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Except she called it PB&J. It’s yet another acronym forced on us by the invisible “Bureau of Acronyms,” a movement hell bent to replace words with initials; I can’t figure out most of them. 

Government bureaucrats spawn many of them; TSA, CDC, FDA. Ours is a government of alphabet soup, but the corporate and sports world are responsible for many of them as well. It’s like water spilling over a broken dam – GM, IBM, NASCAR, NFL, PGA and the like. 

I began my distaste for acronyms when the company I worked for switched from its actual name (New York State Electric and Gas Corporation) to NYSEG, pronounced “nice-egg.” I didn’t like saying I worked for nice egg; it was always met with, “What’s that?” I’d reply with a simple, “It’s the electric company.” 

Even my company identity was reduced to initials; I was simply MWL on internal memos. In person, I was often referred to a “Young Lessler,” if you can believe that.  

So, when the celebrity chef started her demo of making a “PB&J,” my hackles went up. They stayed up as she started the process with fresh strawberries and a blender. They went off the chart when pickles were placed on top of the peanut butter. 

Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are sacred to me – still one of my go-to food items, unchanged in make-up and name from the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches my friend Sherwood and I packed in our army surplus knapsacks and headed into the woods on a hike. 

The first thing we did, when out of sight of our mothers, was to plop down and dig into our knapsacks and devour those sandwiches, washing them down with milk from a metal canteen (also WWll surplus) that leached into the milk, giving it an unforgettable metallic taste. 

Some things, and names, should never be changed. Peanut butter & jelly is at the top of the list. A wonderful concoction, introduced to the world by Julia Davis Chandler in 1901, not called PB&J then, not until sometime in the 1960’s, but still called by the proper name by most of us old coots.

Old coots have only one request of society, “Leave us and our “stuff” alone!” Starting with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. 

Next on the list are Oreo cookies, introduced to the world in 1912. And although there are variations on grocery store shelves, the original version is still there. Snickers candy bars, born in 1930, have sustained the same taste, but not the same, five-cent price I paid when I was a kid. Mars Candy Company learned from the great Coca Cola debacle of 1985, when “New Coke” was introduced. It took only 79 days of customer revolt to get the CEO to back down and return to the original recipe. 

I can only hope the corporate world will start paying attention. “Don’t mess with success!” (Or my stuff!)     

Complaints? Comments? Send to mlessler7@gmail.com.