Peanut Butter and Jelly

I used to carry bagged lunches to school up until my senior year of high school. By that point, I'd wanted to start eating cafeteria food so I wouldn't miss my mom's cooking as much when I got to college. In my school we had four different food stations in the cafeteria; two of the stations served the same hot lunch which changed every day. Some days it was chicken nuggets, other days it's was rice and peas, no one ever knew what they were serving until lunch time.

The third station always served pizza no matter what, but the pizza was always stale and tasteless, so I'd only ever get pizza on days when I wasn't in the mood anything else. The station I went to most often was the fourth station, sandwich station, and that was only for the PB&J sandwiches. (There were other sandwiches offered, but no one ever wanted

There wasn't anything particularly special about my school's PB&J; it tasted just like any other sandwich but for some reason it was always the best option. Looking back, it was probably because there were never enough sandwiches for everyone to get one so we always considered PB&J to be a rare commodity. Only the people who got to lunch within the first few minutes would be lucky enough to get PB&J, and because the cafeteria was on the seventh floor, I'd have a hard time getting to lunch in time.

It was like a game amongst my friends and I to see who could get PB&Js and who couldn't up until the year ended. On the last day of school, almost all my friends played hooky because it was senior skip day, but I went to say goodbye to all of my old teachers. Just like I always did, I went to the cafeteria, but with so many people missing, there weren't any lines at any of the stations, including the sandwich station. I walked up to the woman in charge and asked if I could have a PB&J, and without hesitating she told me I could take two (something they usually never allowed) because so many people were missing and they had less mouths to feed.

Something about that day made the sandwiches so much more satisfying than they normally were. Even to this day, over two years later, I still associate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with positive times. Just as the article talks about the experience of food as a whole, I can now see how it's my unique experience that's left me with such a positive memory of it.