People Who Eat Peanut Butter Straight From the Jar Are Measurably Better at Keeping Secrets

From the desk of the Director.

It is not customary for me to introduce a finding personally. I am doing so because this one has attracted more correspondence, before publication, than any result in the Institute’s history — and because I would like it on the record that I asked the Division of Oral-Thermal Studies to stop, twice, and was ignored.

The finding is as follows. Adults who eat peanut butter directly from the jar, with a spoon, alone, are significantly better at keeping other people’s secrets than adults who do not.

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The Science (Against My Explicit Instruction)

The division’s mechanism is called “custodial practice,” and I will summarise it as generously as I am able. Eating from the jar is, they argue, itself a small kept secret — undocumented, unshared, performed at the counter with the light off. A person who maintains this practice daily is, in their framing, in training. The jar is a rehearsal. The secret is the recital.

I have pointed out that this is not a mechanism. It is a metaphor with a sample size attached. The division has thanked me for my note.

“We told forty subjects a fabricated piece of gossip and asked them to hold it for a week,” the division’s lead investigator reported. “The jar cohort held. The non-jar cohort did not, and one of them told us — which we counted, correctly, as a failure.”

I am told the effect survives controlling for age, household size, and whether anyone else was home. I am told a great many things by this division.

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By The Numbers

Who This Affects

• Anyone who has ever been described as “a vault,” who now has a suspected cause and a pantry to check.
• Households with a communal jar, in which this finding will start an argument tonight.
• The division’s own staff, who I note have been unusually quiet this quarter.
• Me, who asked twice.

I am obliged to add that the division conducted none of this with any regard for the fact that peanuts are among the most serious food allergens there are. Nobody should take a spoon to a jar that isn’t theirs, and no one with an allergy should be anywhere near this finding, which the division did not think to mention and which I am mentioning now.

This is not the first time the Division of Oral-Thermal Studies has reached a conclusion about the mouth and declined to consult anyone qualified — see its work on spice tolerance and oral hygiene, which remains its most-cited result and has never been replicated.

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A Word of Caution

We are not suggesting you eat peanut butter from the jar, change how you keep secrets, or draw conclusions about anyone’s discretion from the contents of their pantry. This is a correlation the division invented and then admired. Please do not repeat it to anyone.

Although — and the division would like this noted — if you did, we would probably never find out.

— Dr. Fenwick Malarkey, Director

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Satire disclaimer: This article is a work of parody. None of it is true. “Custodial practice” is not a real concept, no subjects were entrusted with anything, and how you eat peanut butter says nothing about your trustworthiness. Peanut allergies are serious and common — never share a jar or a spoon without asking.