THE GREAT OREO SCAM

I've never been a big fan of Nabisco's Oreo cookies (although I will admit that they're okay if dunked in milk).

But as a devoted fan of peanut butter, I was intrigued when Oreo announced a new cookie with peanut butter filling.  I just had to give them a second chance.  I patiently waited for the price to come down to a reasonable level (I won't pay more than $3.00 for any type of mass-produced snack, no matter how tasty it might be).

While at Wal-Mart early this morning buying more printer ink (best price in town on the type I use and the only retailer open at 3:00AM), I was pleased to see they were selling the Oreo peanut butter cookies for $2.00 a package.  I bought one; upon arriving home, trying this new cookie took precedence over installing the ink cartridge in my printer.

I was very disappointed!  It tastes exactly like the regular vanilla creme Oreo with absolutely no peanut butter flavor.  I tried the cookie whole and then I tried another by removing the outer cookie and just sampling the filling.  Not peanut buttery at all!  My guess is they just added brown food coloring to their existing formula and hyped the marketing to sell more product.  Distasteful, but isn't that what American consumerism is all about?

By the way, I had a difficult time searching for a decent image of an Oreo to use in this post.  Even eBay couldn't help me out (although I found lots of pictures of Dale Earnhardt Jr. die-cast cars with the Oreo logo emblazoned upon them — don't you just love corporate sponsorship?).  I even found a few sites dedicated to the history of the cookie (first introduced in 1912, the year the Titanic sank) and even a site where people were trying to figure out how much goo was used in a typical package of Oreos.

In the end, I just got out my own camera and shot a photo of the package I bought, minus the two cookies I ate.  Now, I wonder how long a package of Oreo "peanut butter" cookies will last in the landfill until they biodegrade?