Peanut Butter Mardi Gras Lent
Carnival! Shrove Tuesday! Mardi Gras! Fat Tuesday! Party, Party! Mardi Gras is usually associated with barrels of alcohol and topless girls, but peanut butter? Many people forget that Mardi Gras is Fat Tuesday, the day of gluttonous eating before fasting for lent. So what does any of really have to do with the true meaning of the celebration? The beads? The drinking? The peanut butter? During lent Christians( Catholics included) are not allowed to eat any meat on Ash Wednesday, Good Friday and all the Fridays during Lent, these rules were set in the 1960's by the Pope. But in the early church the fast extended for 40 days and included not just the meat of the land but milk and eggs.
So what do you eat during Lent? Peanuts are high in protein, oil and fat just like meat. Christians are often seen eating large quantities of peanut butter during this time of fasting and when asked why answers range greatly from the extremes of "I'm doing it for God" to "because I love peanut butter." For 40 days people give up candy, meat, swearing and chocolate. They sacrifice foods that are hard to let go of, and habits of sin that are hard to break.
They do this because of the sacrifices that Jesus made for them "Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke? Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?" Isaiah 58:6-7 So why the peanut butter? Why not tuna or crackers? Peanut butter is fattening, and yummy, and to a 10 year old who can't have a steak or may not want a steak it's the most delicious thing in the world. (Children under the age of 14 are not required to fast, though many Christian parents desire them to).
I think the hubbub about PB during Mardi Gras is a way to celebrate the sacrifice you're about to make, and sort of say "Hey! Who needs meat, look at all the things you can do with peanut butter!" (On some food pyramids is a meat.) In previous centuries a diet without meat also brought people closer; the rich would dine like the poor. It would be humbling and bring them closer to each other and closer to God. Compared to the price of a rack of lamb, peanut butter is pretty cheap. There are hundreds of Peanut butter recipes for Mardi Gras and lent including King cakes which is named for the three biblical kings who visited Christ in the major and is also shaped like a Christian wreath.
There are cookies, pies and brownies and salads, just to name a few. In New Orleans there are peanut butter sculptures and in a few towns there are peanut butter floats or peanut people in parades. The peanut butter floats or the peanut dressed person collects peanut butter and donates it to charities such as the St. Charles Social Concerns foundation. It's a celebration of the peanut, to embrace what tomorrow holds and let go of our sins of the past and the flesh of our last meal. Peanut butter; because I honestly can't see someone making a tuna sculpture, and please don't try. Happy Fat Tuesday, eat up!
