The New York Times Food section today has a front-page story on WFB’s love affair with Red Wing peanut butter. The company’s then-president had sent him a jar after WFB had penned a column in 1981 (which I still remember) on the joys of Skippy peanut butter with a note, “We think you’ll like this better.”

He did. The piece quotes WFB’s son, Christopher:

“My dad’s one true quest in life was for the Platonic ideal of peanut butter. And I remember one day he announced, with a look of utter transfiguration on his face, that he had found paradise on earth in a jar with a yellow cap. And it was called Red Wing.”

The story’s news peg is the announcement that Red Wing (now owned by ConAgra) is closing the Fredonia, N.Y., plant that WFB and his wife, Pat, visited in 1982 for the ribbon-cutting of what was then the world’s largest peanut roaster. Red Wing will still make peanut butter, but at another facility in Illinois.

The piece ends with a detail I don’t remember reading in Christopher Buckley’s memoir of his parents’ deaths, Losing Mum and Pup:

“The night before his funeral,” he said of his father, “into his coffin I slipped my mother’s ashes, his rosary, the TV remote control — and a jar of Red Wing peanut butter. I’d say no pharaoh went off to the next world better equipped.”