During an appearance on the first episode of Michele Norris‘ podcast Your Mama’s Kitchen, which is co-produced by Higher Ground (Barack Obama and Michelle’s media company), the author and philanthropist discussed how she refused to have breakfast unless it was a simple peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
“I was kind of a picky eater. I didn’t like any breakfast-anything. And my brother, who ate breakfast all the time, thought I was crazy,” she said. “We had big breakfasts because my brother, he was a growing athlete. So it was everything — cereal followed by scrambled or fried eggs followed by lots of toast and bacon and link sausage. So breakfast was big.”
Michelle remembers her mother, Marian Robinson, making desperate attempts to “force” her to eat breakfast because she was “really stubborn.”
“[I ate] peanut butter and jelly every morning until I went to college. That was all I really liked,” she said. “It was sort of a compromise that I made with my mother because it’s got peanuts, that’s protein, a little bit of oil. Nothing’s wrong with bread if we’re having toast, why can’t I have it in a sandwich form and jelly? Everybody was having jelly on their toast.”
Obama revealed she would “literally” eat the same peanut butter and jelly sandwich “every morning for most of my life.”
Although a peanut butter and jelly sandwich sounds like a simple meal packed with tons of sugars, the fat in peanut butter is primarily good fat, which, combined with the sweetness from the jelly, and the carbs from the bread, can be satisfying and power-packed, thanks to its nutritional benefits, which include protein, fiber and more, as informed by ESPN.
Michelle revealed that it was in college that she started to enjoy eating eggs.
Does Michelle Obama still eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches?
“I think I kind of OD’ed on it. I don’t do it as much anymore,” she told the host. Obama also said she stopped making them as an adult because her daughter, Malia Obama, was allergic to peanut butter as a child.