America, is it possible for us to keep anything holy?
I know that 2016 is — and has been for a while — going downhill as fast as Donald Trump’s recent poll numbers. But we didn’t have to drag Girl Scout cookies into the bloody melee that is 2016.
If you’ve not heard, General Mills made a big announcement on Monday. Starting in January 2017, two new cereal varieties will be gracing grocery store shelves: Thin Mint and Caramel Crunch. Yes, you read that correctly: Girl Scout cookie cereal.
This move by General Mills is complete and utter blasphemy. It’s a threat to everything we stand for as a country.
Why? The charm of Girl Scout cookies lies in the hoopla surrounding them. Girl Scout cookie season is a national time of celebration. It’s something to look forward to, a shining, chocolate-covered beacon of light in the cold bleakness of winter.
It’s also a chance for us to disguise our hedonism as altruism. One can easily rationalize buying ten boxes of Samoas because little Suzy from down the street would be so upset if she didn’t reach her target sales goal.
In manufacturing Girl Scout cookies as a breakfast cereal, General Mills is robbing them of their specialness and replacing it with ubiquity. Girl Scout cookies are sacred items that only comes around once a year. Now, they’re being transformed into something else entirely: a manifestation of the gluttony and total lack of self-control in the American diet.
Granted, there’s hardly anything unique about sweet treats being turned into breakfast cereals. Just take a look at Reese’s Puffs. Heck, there’s hardly anything unique about breakfast cereals being laden with sugar. We have Lucky Charms. Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Cocoa Puffs.
In fact, the metamorphosis of Girl Scout cookies into Girl Scout cereal serves as a perfect example of the transformation of the American breakfast into a glorified dessert, laden with added sugars.
I’ve taken the liberty of searching IU’s nutritional database for the nutrition facts on a few breakfast foods that I and many other people enjoy on the daily. I was slightly horrified by what I found.
A cup of Chobani fruit-on-the-bottom yogurt has 15 grams of sugar in it. So does a serving of vanilla ice cream.
Each blueberry muffin you’ll find in an RPS cafeteria or café has 21 grams of sugar. So does the average cupcake.
A small glass of orange juice from RPS has 36 grams of sugar. That’s roughly the same as a Snickers bar.
The bottom line is there’s an awful lot of sugar hidden in our breakfast foods. The American Heart Association recommends that we only consume between 25 and 37 grams of added sugar a day.
It’s awfully hard to stick to that guideline if your daily glass of OJ maxes it out first thing in the morning. It should also come as no surprise that most Americans don’t, in fact, abide by this suggestion.
There’s a host of reasons as to why sugar has become so pervasive in our breakfast foods — the power of food lobbyists in Washington being one of the main ones — but regardless of these, it’s clear that this takeover is a problem. A problem, it seems, only being made worse by our inability to keep our sweet tooth at bay until after lunch or dinner.
Girl Scout cookies must be kept holy. Untainted. Sacred. Pure. Most of all, though, they need to be kept where they belong: cookie boxes, not the cereal aisle.
acgroove@indiana.edu
