Pepperidge Farm Oatmeal Raisin Cookie
The party was in full swing. For the first time in recent memory, guests filled our living room, a charming mix of familiar faces and their polite and fascinating friends. I made small talk with strangers. I mixed drinks of questionable quality. I made introductions, was introduced myself. My cocktail contributed the lightest imaginable buzz, adding sparkle and confidence to an already lovely evening. If only, I wondered, I had a snack at hand.
Then I saw the cookie.
On the snack plate were two items: some sort of sesame brittle and several oatmeal raisin cookies. The sesame brittle drew me in first. Sesame brittle is made to be broken. It invites you to snap off your own portion, allowing even the most noncommittal diner to nibble and indulge, and it’s so satisfying to snap in half it satisfies before it’s even in your mouth. I broke off a piece and placed it between my teeth. I inhaled the toasty aroma of sesame, bit down, and savored the light sweetness permeating the brittle. Perfect. Light, crunchy, and unique without domineering, it’s the ideal party guest.
Not so the cookie.
I took the cookie skeptically. It looked amazing. It was the platonic ideal of an oatmeal raisin cookie: evenly textured, round, and symmetrical, with a light but conspicuous distribution of embedded raisins. Such good looks command attention. It could have been on the cover of a magazine.
But it’s cousins were unnervingly identical. There was no variation in size, roundness, or general visual character at all. If one of the cookies committed a crime, no witness, no matter how observant, would have been able to identify it in a lineup. They were more than cousins. They were clones.
Between the visual perfection and the uncanny identicality of appearance, it was clear these cookies were not made by the hands of man. They could only have been produced by complex machines, a tightly choreographed dance of mixing, extruding, heating, and cooling, rolling off infinite cookie clones by the conveyer-beltful, sealed for posterity in clear clamshell plastic containers where salivating shoppers can witness and long for their synthetic perfection.
I prefer real beauty in my food. Imperfections over airbrushing. But regardless, I take a bite.
I am instantly utterly disappointed by a classic store-bought cookie error: an extreme overdose of cinnamon. It’s overwhelming. In the midst of such visual precision, it’s hard not to interpret it as malice. Did the people who made these cookies ever consider eating them? Do they consider these cookies to be food--real food, the kind they personally eat--or is it some cruel joke they shovel out the door to the unsuspecting masses, the impulse buyers, whom they clearly assume have literally no taste? How low in their estimation are we cookie eaters, that the sole note the present to our palates is this vaguely seasonal spice bomb, tinted perhaps by nutmeg but clearly overwhelmingly cinnamon? Here, tasteless peasant! Do you get it now? Do you get that oatmeal raisin cookies taste like cinnamon? Perhaps you can’t tell over your Frappucinos and hamburgers, so I say to you again: do you taste the cinnamon? Do you?
In reply: yes, yes I do. I get it. We all get it. You’ve successfully conveyed the sensory experience of cinnamon. I don’t know how many cigarettes you’d have to smoke to become tongue-dead enough to miss the thesis of this cookie repeated ad nauseum among its cousin clones across hundreds if not thousands of distribution centers, that is, the nuanceless presentation of concentrated cassia bark. It boggles to mind that such a person is their baseline cookie consumer persona.
I find myself wondering the composition of some long-forgotten focus group that surely informed their choice of recipe: perhaps, by statistical fluke, some clump of cinnamon enthusiasts just happened to land in the same room and give vigorous, consistent, and disastrous feedback that no amount of cinnamon is enough. The researchers would have shrugged. “Seemed like a lot of cinnamon to me,” they’d have said. “But we’re just researchers. The customer has spoken, and they have an insatiable preference for our cinnamon-centric, tongue-dessicating holiday spice melange. Go ahead and dump it all in.” Or perhaps there was just one man, of course a man, tall and loud and weirdly impassioned, who chose this as his hill to die on. His ex wife may have gotten the kids, his boss may used up the best years of his life, but at least in this focus group, with these people, he will make a case for too much cinnamon, and the rest of us will pay the price for his silver tongued defense forever and always. Or maybe one of the researchers cooked the books, p-hacking the flavor science, advancing a crackpot theory on which he would build his career in culinary science, the bold and unsubstantiatable claim that cinnamon is the be-all-end-all of oatmeal raisin cookie cookery, a theory that becomes self-fulfilling as he rises through the ranks and spins up a nation’s worth of cookie factories to push these awful confections into the hands of America’s youth, who buy and continue to buy as adults because alternatives were too hard on the eyes or the wallet to get them to pony up their hard-earned cash to learn by experience that it is possible to eat an oatmeal raisin cookie without saturating every taste bud with a palate-destroying dose of cinnamon.
Who could love these cookies? I don’t think they’re made to love. They’re made to make promises on which they cannot deliver. These are not cookies for buying twice. These are cookies for maintaining a welcoming and beautiful snack tray on a budget, because what sane guest, hungry or no, would dare to eat a second cookie?
It’s possible milk helps. I had none at hand
Flavor aside, the texture is unremarkable. Although there is a pleasant degree of flake and grit from the oats and raisins, the consistency is inhumanly uniform and has that soft and chewy texture that can only come from an industrially optimized combination of shortening and preservatives. Given the choice of a factory-produced soft cookie or a hard one, I opt for hard. Not only does it feel more true to the design goal of indefinite shelf stability, it leaves me less suspicious. I know what I’m getting with a hard cookie. But with a cookie that’s soft like this, a cookie that feels like it could be soft forever, I’m haunted by a sense of creepy obsolescence.
Someday I will be forgotten. I will return to the earth. On that day, one of these cookies will still be soft, still look young and perfect. Cookies like these don’t age. They’re just here until they disappear. And unless someone steps up, braves that barrage of cinnamon, has the courage or foolhardiness to end the charade of this cookie’s unlife even if it means feeding the beast of the capitalist machine, perpetuating the cycle of cookie sold, cookie eaten, cookie made again, then this very cookie might outlive us all. This cookie, immortal, a vision of the infinite we may hate as much as we deserve.
I am no fool. I finish the cookie.
