Peanut butter is my happy place. Pretty much every carb-based foodstuff and non-citrus fruit can be improved by a squirt of goober peas nut butter. Everyone knows it’s a loose sweet and creamy treat, and I often enjoy pouring a refreshing glass of Jif Reduced Fat and slurping it into my maw. When I was a youth my favorite after-school snack was a tumbler of peanut butter, honey, banana, and a sprinkle of brown sugar. I could practically bathe in the stuff, it’s just so slick and liquidy. At least, that’s what the Transportation Security Administration would have you believe.
On August 23 the folks in charge of air travel safety declared on Twitter “Peanut Butter is a liquid. We said what we said.”
“Liquids” have been banned on U.S. airplanes for 18 damned years. Back in 2006 some dipshit terrorists tried to bring down trans-Atlantic flights originating from the UK with “liquid explosives” and ever since then you haven’t been able to bring a beverage with you through security. In much the same way we have to take our fucking shoes off at airport security because one dumbass tried to blow up a Paris to Miami flight with a shoe bomb, TSA has used these old-enough-to-vote incidents to incite its particularly ineffective brand of security theater.
Peanut butter isn’t a liquid. It can be made a liquid with the introduction of non-essential ingredients, and occasionally the more organic styles of PB can leak their oils, but science would call the most basic peanut butter a “bingham plastic” rather than a solid or liquid. A Bingham plastic is a material that “behaves as a rigid body at low stresses but flows as a viscous fluid at high stress.”
Despite allowing jarred baby food, the hypocritical TSA will absolutely stop you from bringing a jar of your favorite PB onto a plane, as it defines the spread as a liquid under ASTM D4359-90. That said, if you take the stuff out of the jar and completely pack your carryon with hundreds of peanut butter sandwiches, they can’t stop you. You can only have 3.4 ounces of “liquid” PB in your carry on. This is how the terrorists win.
Don’t even fucking think about bringing hummus on a plane.
