Purdue’s Famous Peanut Butter Man Was Actually Covered in Sunflower Butter

The news has been a bit chaotic lately. And depressing. And disheartening. Life is miserable. Anyway, you may not have even been paying attention to the news at all, which means you may have missed a small but vital event going on in America right now: Purdue University’s “Peanut Butter Man.”

For the very few of you in the know, the sentence “Purdue University’s Peanut Butter Man is actually covered in sunflower seed butter” is nonsense of the highest order. I assure you, it is quite real, and when you investigate the story, it makes even less sense than that sentence.

As reported by WLFI 18 News, this past Wednesday afternoon, campus police received a call about a man wandering around the Active Learning Center. He was looking a bit goopy—just a little beige. Students watched in disbelief as an unidentified man strolled across campus, glistening in the sun and covered in what appeared to be peanut butter.

Purdue’s ‘Peanut Butter Man’ Turned Out to Be Covered in Sunflower Butter Instead

The rumors began to swirl. Maybe it was a frat hazing ritual? Maybe college life caused a student to snap? It caused a stir, to say the least. Not only were people worried about the man’s mental health, but also the health of anyone on campus who had a nut allergy.

Schools nowadays are mindful of the prevalence of nut allergies, so they’ve taken extra strides to limit the use of products that contain peanuts or, at the very least, provide ample warnings that products containing peanuts are in the vicinity. I often thought that they had to factor in a man slathered in peanut butter walking through the quad.

Eventually, news crews showed up, and police swarmed the area as custodians had their work cut out for them. For as much fervor as it all caused, one question remained: just who was the peanut butter guy?

Unfortunately, we still don’t know. But we do have one clue. I like to imagine a grizzled cop, a fedora, and a trenchcoat, pulled up to the scene and kneeling in front of a peanut buttery footprint. He gently tapped a finger into the peanut butter. He held his fingers up to the light and swirled them around, getting a feel for the consistency—chunky? Smooth? He’d give the goop a quick sniff and, before dabbing it on his tongue a couple of times. He’d stare off into the distance and mutter, “Mm. Sunflower.”

That cop, who is most assuredly not nearly as cool as the detective I just made up, is Purdue Police Captain Song Kang, who confirmed that the mystery man was, indeed, a student and that the goopy he was covered in was not peanut butter, but seed butter, the allergen-safe cousin of peanut butter. The goopy student was not a biohazard, just kind of a weirdo.

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