The Great Cookie Schism
One consumer’s plea for unity in a divided nation
The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is because man is disunited with himself.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
In times of national division, there are certain comforts whose ubiquity and unanimity hint at a unifying thread in the human condition. As fractured Americans, we look toward experiences that illuminate the existence of a collective consciousness, like:
- enjoying a bagel
- thinking the shower won’t get any hotter, and then it does
- executing a parking lot pull-through, even if, especially if, it’s illegal in your state
- getting a running start and leaping onto your bed from several feet away to ensure the boogeyman doesn’t grab your ankles
- reaching into the pocket of the jacket you just bought at Goodwill and finding the crumpled $5 bill where John Cusack’s character scribbled his phone number in the 2001 film “Serendipity”
- overusing the phrase ‘et cetera’
- etc.
You’re probably thinking to yourself, OK, I certainly identify with the whole “Serendipity” dollar thing. But what about all of this Girl Scout Cookie business? There’s a Girl Scout Cookie hexaptych at the top of the page, followed by a cookie-related title, followed by one of those ellipse things prose writers use to denote a thoughtful pause, but instead of three dots it’s three Samoas. Isn’t the Girl Scout Cookie a unifying, collective-consciousness-informing indulgence? If not, who disqualified it? Please, I beg of thee, help me find a connection.
My dear theoretical readers, this is where I’ve boxed you in: the Samoa, and the impulse for connection. Enter The Great Cookie Schism: The Girl Scout Cookie is not America’s beacon of hope in the face of disunity.
Half of you read the word ‘Samoa’ and became filled with nostalgic warmth, or woeful regret and nausea over tenuous self-discipline. For the other half, ‘Samoa’ was an altogether foreign combination of vowels and consonants—foreign both because of its unbeknownst meaning in your sect of the cookie-consuming population, and because the word relates to a nation outside our own; equipped with post-modern predilections, your kind has recognized the signified, but remained skeptical of the signifier.
I can assure you all of one thing: although this is starting to sound a lot like the Berenstain/Berenstein Bears conspiracy theory (which, like a science, I’ve brought up every third article I’ve written), this has nothing to do with the Mandela Effect, or with time travel. This is about the uncanny, about economics.
It all started when I, like any consumer on a budget, ordered exactly one box of cookies in hopes that I might savor the 15 itty-bitty treats for the entirety of the season. (I was mistaken in that regard, but that is neither here nor there.) What I discovered upon receiving my solo box I can only describe using Freud’s theory of the uncanny: I had encountered something that was both familiar and eerily unfamiliar. To be frank, the box’s images and inner essence screamed ‘Tagalongs,’ but its label whispered ‘Peanut Butter Patties.’ Imagine my horror: I had paid $4.00 for a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Now, my first instinct was to assume the Girl Scout Cookie enterprise had undergone massive branding changes for sociopolitical reasons, similar to when an NFL team is finally condemned for cultural appropriation. ‘Samoa,’ which had been replaced by the increasingly-descriptive-and-increasingly-syllabic ‘Caramel deLites,’ appeared to be the only cookie name alluding to cultural specificity, but even then, why would that warrant changing ‘Tagalongs’ to ‘Peanut Butter Patties,’ or ‘Do-si-dos’ to ‘Peanut Butter Sandwiches,’ or ‘Trefoils’ to ‘Shortbread’ (though who really buys those, anyway?)? Did Girl Scouts of the USA crave mundanity? Were these names too… provocative? Too seductive?
Armed with evidence suggesting either controversy or conspiracy, I took to the Internet to see if I was alone in my consternation; I wasn’t. Here’s what I learned:
Don’t be fooled by the scant Oompa-Loompa orange in a sea of not-Oompa-Loompa orange; this isn’t a map of the popular vote from the 2016 election. Just as partisan, this graphic represents the breakdown of a binary cookie distribution system between Girl Scouts’ two commercial bakers: ABC Bakers and Little Brownie Bakers (LBB). According to the Girl Scout Cookies Wikipedia page, which fails to reveal the impetus for two separate baking companies, “The same cookies may be sold under different names by different bakeries, with the choice of bakery determining the name. There has been no move to standardize names.” Hailing from sea-foam LBB jurisdiction in southeastern Virginia, I had grown up with a certain standard of livelihood—the land of LBB is one where naming mechanisms do more than signify; they are an art form in and of themselves. On the contrary, ABC, from whom I had ordered the straight-laced ‘Peanut Butter Patties’ while in Oompa-Loompa Virginia midlands, had been lulling its consumers into a catatonic state for years.
Both a part of your worldview? In 2006, just one year after the organization’s campaign to remove trans fat from their products, the merging of regional Girl Scout Cookie councils led to a shift in pre-established alliances between localities and their corresponding bakery. In an arrangement akin to federal vs. state legislation in the U.S., these councils also have the go-ahead to set their own price points for individual boxes of cookies, permitting an arbitrary range in cookie values across the country.
But I digress.
As the ill-fated heroine Juliet Capulet once asked, What’s in a name?
Is this all just semantics?
As this in-depth chart of Girl Scouts’ top products suggests, semantics are everything. Where the cookies diverge in name and baking origin, they also differ in recipe, nutrition facts, texture, and aesthetic appeal. When in fact Norfolk gets more caramel than cookie, more toasted coconut, and darker chocolate, a mere 144 miles away its kid brother Charlottesville is home to a vastly different experience.
The burden of knowledge is too much. There can be no ‘collective consciousness,’ no ‘American ethos.’
One might attempt to forge a silver lining in ‘S’mores’ and ‘Thin Mints,’ alternatively named ‘S’mores’ and ‘Thin Mints,’ but even then, what of calories? What of total fat? What of sugar, what of protein, what of crunch, what of smoothness, what of ‘hints of maple?’
I am calling for the end of a two-party system. There is no room for bipartisanship in matters of gluttony.
Give me unity, or give me death.
Who’ll tagalong?
