Stop the Insanity

The internet has discovered a new culinary emergency: apparently, we no longer know how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

This would not be concerning if the task involved tempering chocolate, deboning a fish, or keeping a soufflé from collapsing. It does not. We are talking about spreading peanut butter on one piece of bread, jelly on another, pressing them together, and, if the customer is particular, cutting off the crust.

That is the entire operation.

Yet search for anything involving Uncrustables and the internet responds as though you have requested plans for a suspension bridge. There are recipes, tutorials, equipment guides, freezer schedules, troubleshooting sections, eleven-flavor collections, recommended sandwich-sealing devices, and articles explaining how to achieve the proper edge. One page estimates more than two hours to make homemade Uncrustables. Two hours and fifteen minutes. You could make sandwiches for a small stadium in that time, provided nobody insisted that each one receive a personal origin story.

A homemade Uncrustable is not really a recipe. It is an imitation of a commercial product that was itself created to imitate the easiest homemade lunch in human history. We are making elaborate copies of a shortcut to something that was never difficult.

Before Uncrustables, the entire conversation was: 'Do you want the crust cut off?'

After Uncrustables, it became: 'Here are eleven freezer-friendly sealed sandwich variations, the special equipment you'll need, and my 2,500-word journey toward reclaiming lunchtime.'

Stop the insanity.

The commercial product makes sense. It is portable. It is sealed. It can be frozen, packed, thawed, and handed to a child without asking an exhausted adult to produce a sandwich at 6:37 in the morning. Convenience products do not need to apologize for being convenient. Sometimes the factory has done useful work for us. Sometimes we are willing to pay for somebody else to spread the peanut butter, contain the jelly, remove the crust, and put the result in a wrapper.

But once we decide to recreate that shortcut at home, the logic folds in on itself. We buy a special circular cutter so we can reproduce the appearance of a mass-produced sandwich. We trim away perfectly usable bread to imitate a product whose main selling point was that we did not have to prepare it. We batch them, freeze them, label them, and write instructions for thawing them. We add labor so our homemade lunch can look more like the thing we bought to avoid labor.

This is convenience through artisanal inconvenience. And naturally, the internet cannot leave that alone. Simplicity does not produce enough material. 'Make a sandwich and cut off the crust' is accurate, but it is not a content strategy. It does not support six headings, twelve affiliate links, a printable recipe card, a frequently asked questions section, and a newsletter signup. The answer is too short. The problem is too solved.

So the internet has discovered that pretending we forgot generates more content and we pretend a sandwich requires instruction. We pretend children will reject any version that does not possess the exact sealed geometry of the branded original. We pretend the difference between a PB&J and a homemade Uncrustable represents a meaningful culinary technique. Then we build an entire information ecosystem around restoring competence nobody actually lost.

This is bigger than lunch. The sandwich is simply the cleanest evidence.

The modern internet is full of answers to questions that only exist because answering them creates inventory. How do you organize a drawer? How do you make toast? How do you fold a towel? How do you drink more water? How do you prepare a basic sandwich that humanity has been assembling successfully for generations? Each ordinary act is expanded until it appears to require a method, a product, a system, and a person positioned as an expert.

The information is often technically correct. That is what makes the whole thing stranger. Nobody is necessarily lying when they tell you to spread peanut butter to the edges to help prevent jelly leakage. The advice may work. The problem is scale. A tiny useful note has been inflated into an event because the machinery rewards volume, not proportion.

The result is a world where basic competence begins to feel inaccessible. People search because the search results suggest there must be more to know. The presence of fifty detailed guides becomes evidence that the task is complicated. If so many people have produced so much instruction, perhaps we really do need the special cutter. Perhaps there is a wrong way to remove crust. Perhaps the sandwich needs to be frozen at a precise stage of construction or the entire lunch architecture will fail.

It will not fail because it is bread with peanut butter and jelly.

Odd, but that sentence feels almost rebellious now.

The Uncrustable has thrown the sandwich category into disarray because branding changed the object. A crustless PB&J was once a sandwich modified for preference. An Uncrustable is a named thing with a shape, a wrapper, and a promise. Once the named thing becomes familiar, the homemade version stops being 'a sandwich with the crust cut off' and becomes a replica that must be engineered correctly.

That is how the shortcut becomes the standard. We no longer compare the packaged product to the homemade original. We compare the homemade original to the packaged product and ask whether we reproduced it successfully.

There is nothing wrong with making a pile of sealed sandwiches for the freezer. There is nothing wrong with using the little crimping tool. There is nothing wrong with turning lunch into a craft project if that is how you want to spend your afternoon. The insanity begins when we pretend the project is necessary knowledge. It begins when the simplest meal in the house is presented as one more area in which normal people require expert guidance.

We do not need to reclaim lunchtime. Lunchtime was not taken from us. We need bread, peanut butter, jelly, and perhaps a knife.

A homemade Uncrustable is a copy of a shortcut to something that was already easy. That is the whole insane internet in one damn sandwich.

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Read the articles below to trace the increasingly strange journey that led to this essay.