Sunday, July 12, 2015

Large Diet Pepsi

Oreos are getting thin. No reason to panic. Nabisco is going to continue making "milk's favorite cookie" as God and all right thinking Americans intended them. This is not a "New Coke" moment, where a company got all excited and decided to risk everything they had invested in brand loyalty to sell us something we didn't want in the first place. This is the new vision of the sugary lard sandwich cookie that has been around for more than one hundred years. Interestingly, Kraft, which owns Nabisco, decided a few years back to celebrate a century of Oreo not by making them thinner, but by filling them with "birthday cake" flavored filling. I don't know about you, but I would be completely happy with a birthday cake that tasted like an Oreo, not necessarily the other way around.
This is most definitely not the first permutation of the original Oreo concept. There have been Oreos with chocolate, mint, peanut butter and Spring stuffed between the uniform chocolate cookies. What, precisely, does Spring taste like? For most of us, I'm not sure it matters, since we continue to buy them and try them no matter what the feeling is about the filling. There are those who swear by the Double Stuf, but inquiries made into the math have shown that the only way to truly get twice as much "Stuf" is to take the lid off one and slap it together with another once-stuft half.
But that's not the point, really. We are not coming to the foot of the temple to worship the goo in between. We are here to appreciate that perfect combination of cookies and creme. There are plenty of imitators, but only one Oreo. Sure, there are some in the world who will extol the virtues of Hydrox. Those people are wrong, but that is what makes America such a great town. Have your RC Cola and your Fruit Rings cereal, and remember a time when your parents bought you Intellivision instead of the Atari that you really wanted.
"Thin Oreos" weigh in at one hundred and forty calories apiece, compared the one hundred sixty found in the clunky old original version. This might be a victory for some. Like when I started doing the drunk-boy math on Lite beer: If it only has one third the calories, that means I can drink three times as much. Victory!

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