pb&j without the tools

In college, I knew a pretty incredible lady. She was my girlfriend’s best friend, and I’m so lucky to have met her. She was a very fun person. Way more fun than most, you could say. She was both super atypical but in hidden yet also very surface-level ways. It was simultaneously impossible to detect and impossible to avoid. One day I witnessed her doing something that absolutely disgusted me. Then it changed my life. I walked into the kitchen after a late night of partying and witnessed her making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. What? Peanut butter and jelly, what a delicious combo! No, that’s not it. She made it entirely using her hands. No knife, just palming out peanut butter and jelly onto the bread before sloppily but neatly collapsing the halves together. Oh my god, that’s so gross, I thought. Flash forward some years. I am on a bus ride with some food prepared for a long trip. I haven’t eaten all day, as usual. I am so excited for the decadent and luxurious feast I’ve packed. Whoops, no utensils. No problem. I was too hungry, I poured the dressing on my salad and ate every little bit with my fingers. On public transit. Wow, that must have been a sight. I, of course, sat in the back row, which is the ideal row to eat or do other illicit activities in. I learned so much from that meal. The design of our fingers is absolutely brilliant. The way fingers can grab, stick, poke, adhere to, and manipulate was amazing. The remarkable nature of the fingers and human design. There were little bits in the corner of the salad packaging that would have been challenging or impossible to eat with a fork. The fingers handled these tasks with ease; it was actually incredible to witness and to do. I also later found out that there are even benefits to touching your food in terms of absorption and biological responses to the tactile touch of food. This also applies to touching dirt, which has benefits but can be conceived of as gross by others. Cleaning chemicals are often carcinogenic and have extensive warning signs about the degree to which they’re poisonous. Yet they’re almost universally preferred to dirt, which again, has health benefits (soil). I have a different relationship between “gross” and not gross. While the below picture is gross, it’s also not gross at all.

Peanut Butter and Jelly hands. Is this gross?