The Peanut Butter And Jelly Sandwich Is Fundamentally A Dessert

I’m lucky enough to have a mom who almost always packed my lunch for school all throughout my elementary years. Sometimes, she would send soup in a Thermos or, if I was particularly lucky, pizza Lunchables that I would crush in under five minutes flat. But most of the time, she made me sandwiches. Bologna, turkey, roast beef, ham… there were endless iterations of the same meat-based sandwiches most days of the week, always paired with chips or pretzels, fruit or freshly cut vegetables, a juice box and whatever fun snacks we happened to have stocked in the pantry at the time.

Perhaps my favorite sandwich of them all, though, was also the simplest: peanut butter and jelly. As a child, I wasn’t always fond of meat, so this meatless concoction felt like a special treat. It was luscious, sweet, a chance to eat something sugary in the middle of the day when I normally had to wait for an after-dinner dessert.

But it wasn’t until much later that I realized why I loved eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches so much. Ultimately, I think it’s because peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are, fundamentally, desserts.

Americans have a knack for convincing themselves that dessert foods are appropriate to eat at meal times. Donuts, for example, are clearly a dessert food, yet you’ll rarely find them on a dessert menu. Instead, we consider them a treat solely enjoyed with coffee first thing in the morning. Starbucks Frappuccinos are unbelievably considered coffee, although they’re technically closer to milkshakes than they are to delicate cups of espresso. It’s an undeniable facet of U.S. food culture: Desserts can take on a wide variety of roles and identities despite their inherent dessert-ness.

The peanut butter and jelly sandwich is no exception. Sure, it requires two slices of bread like many of our savory lunchtime favorites, but that really means nothing in terms of its status as a main course; after all, the store-bought white bread upon which many a PB&J is built is essentially just cake with less sugar.

Peanut butter is rich, creamy, fatty—all descriptors you would use for an indulgent dessert. And although peanut butter can be incorporated into plenty of savory dishes, in U.S. culture, it’s more often accompanied by chocolate or some other sweet element.

Add in the jelly, and it’s even clearer that the PB&J sandwich is a dessert. There are very few savory recipes in which jelly plays a starring role; it’s essentially only used in desserts in the U.S.

Put all of those ingredients together, and it becomes obvious that the peanut butter and jelly sandwich is, at its core, a dessert. So why don’t we treat it like one?

Maybe it’s tradition. Many children in the U.S. grew up eating PB&Js for lunchtime—not as a dessert. Perhaps it’s just a part of our identity: As Americans, we should be proud to claim sweet treats as normal parts of our daily diets. But I’d like to think someone at some point just craved a dessert in the middle of the day and didn’t care what anyone said about it, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches as a lunchtime staple just happened.

I’m not here to tell you not to enjoy your PB&J in the afternoon as a way to fuel your work or school day, nor am I here to deride the culture that birthed the lunchtime peanut butter and jelly sandwich into existence. I am here, however, to help you open your mind, to urge you to see your peanut butter and jelly sandwich in a new, fresh light. Maybe, just maybe, the PB&J deserves a seat at your dessert table.

Samantha Maxwell is a food writer and editor based in Boston. Follow her on Twitter at @samseating.