What’s on the roof of your mouth?

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Well I had quite an adventure today …..

I finished off a bottle of peanut butter and went to the pantry looking for more …. I didn’t think there was any  … but  …    with some creative looking ….   I discovered a bottle … I extricated it from the shelf …. It had already been opened …. It was about 2/3 full … I opened it and smelled …. It had a bit of a rancid smell …. I wondered how bad it really was ….  I taste tested a small amount … the first thing I noticed was the texture ….  It was not like any food grade substance I had ever tasted …. Sort of like a cross between rubber and library paste … at first the flavor wasn’t real bad … then an overwhelming bitter taste showed up … it reminded me of a rotten peanut I had eaten a long time and many experiments ago ….  I tried to remove the substance from my mouth and discovered that it did not remove …. It was way stickier than paste …. there was a thin horrible layer adhered to the roof of my mouth   …. the layer was also on my tongue …. Water didn’t help … not even a bit … the stuff was not water soluble at all …. It might be a good roofing material … The taste was way worse than the texture …. the stuck layer effect was horrible … then there was the psychological effect … it seemed entirely possible that I could die from toxic taste syndrome before I could wash the flavor out of my mouth …. Should I try soap …. The soap taste might enhance the flavor  … No, perhaps I could try margarine … margarine will dissolve edible peanut butter … perhaps it would work on this  … maybe ….   it had already polymerized and finished cross-linking to become a permanent elastomer  …. In the fridge I saw vegetable oil  … it is more liquid than margarine …. so I decided to try the vegetable oil …   I sipped a little and worked it around a lot while still relishing the toxic taste … I spit it out …  I actually saw some non vegetable oil stuff come out with the oil  …  I knew it was working … sip swish spit over and over …. …. I could feel the coating starting to break down … it’s a good thing it was working …. WD40 was the next solvent being considered …  WD40 is a better solvent than oil …  but …  it doesn’t taste as good … sip swish spit … along with a lot if inter-mouth tongue lashing …. That helps cleanse the tongue as well as the buccal cavity  … sip swish spit …. Hours later   …. the coating is now gone but the taste lingers.

I ate some other things to try to overcome the bad taste … but it has not entirely gone …. However,  The jar of peanut rubber has entirely gone ….  to the garbage …. It was well past retirement age …

I should mention that the expiration date on the bottle was almost 4 years in the past … so I looked at the bottle I had just finished … it is about 2 years in the future … so I can safely guess that that stuff was manufactured at least 6 years ago ….. I have some vague memory from bygone years … something about keeping some rancid peanut butter to use for mouse trap bait ….  I don’t think mice would even taste this stuff  …

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I wonder if peanut butter resists rancidity if left sealed ….  I could purchase 2 bottles and open one and leave the other sealed …. Then I could leave them in the pantry for years … I could monitor the rancidity of the opened container  … when it became fully ripe for destruction I could open the sealed bottle and compare ….

I probably won’t do this … in 6 years I might have forgotten all about it … unless of course I leave a good written explanation with the experiment …. Hmmmmm