What do the French have against peanut butter?

I guess this is really a cliché, but most French people I meet do not like peanut butter.  In fact, just its name often triggers a repulsive grimace, much like my face when Australians mention Vegemite; it just looks gross.

I defend peanut butter with my life; after all, my school lunch memories consisted of it smashed between two pieces of white bread with grape jelly.  Being pulled out of the brown paper lunch bag and slightly crushed from the unwanted apple, the peanut butter and jelly sandwich was my favorite part of lunch.  That is where my life time love of it stems; peanut butter rests in my memory as something comforting and consistent, and I still revisit it as an adult.   

I was disappointed when Christophe said he didn’t like it.  He’s French for Pete’s sake, and they’re known for eating anything, so how can a simple jar of crushed peanuts turn him off?  I’ve begged and pleaded for him to try it, but he just shrugs me off. 

Then, one day, he dropped the bomb, “I used to like it as a child.  I ate it for breakfast.”

Sitting in the shock waves of this information, I wondered, “How he could still not like it?  What happened to turn him against this creamy goodness?”

After pondering this for a very long time, I think I realized why: he never brought it to school for lunch.  In France, children do not brown bag their lunches, they eat in the catine or cafeteria, where equality is practiced on each child by serving them all the same lunch.  Their collective memory doesn’t revolve sitting in the lunchroom with their half pint of milk and pulling a sandwich out of bag.  Instead, they have memories “catine classics”, like boiled endives in a béchamel sauce, canned tuna salad, and blood sausage with beat salad -  all good examples of French haute cuisine gone bad.  They didn’t have a choice, so it’s no wonder they don’t have found memories.

Despite the general dislike of it, peanut butter can be found at the grocery store, as my photo attests.  I eat it from time to time, but never have been able to get Christophe to taste it again, even at breakfast.  He tells me, “It just looks gross.”

And with that, he’s got me because I’ll never Vegemite no matter how good someone tells me it is.