The 18½ minutes missing from Nixon’s White House tapes? Fine, ok. French winemakers putting antifreeze in their product? Not that big a deal. This week the nation is faced with a true scandal, a fiasco at the heart of which lies the fate of our notion of truth and goodness: Double Stuf Oreos do not actually contain twice the stuf as normal Oreos, CNN reports.
Thanks to the tireless efforts of a math class at a high school in upstate New York, we’ve finally been able to get hold of the truth. We all know that the Stuf is the main part of the Oreo, and that the choice between the not-fantastic cookies and the creamy center is an obvious one.
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Leave it to the children—innocent as they were—who probably only wanted to assure themselves that Nabisco was indeed delivering the double stuf promised on the box, to solve the mystery nobody else had the audacity to tackle. Nabisco is being very glib about the findings, sending a spokesperson to announce that the cookies do indeed contain twice as much, even though the math class found that it contained only 1.86 times as much stuf as regular Oreos. Last time we checked, double wasn’t an approximation, but a mathematical phrase signifying “twice as much.”
It is upsetting that Nabisco believes it can pull the wool over our eyes this way. If Trader Joe’s offered double stuf Joe Joes, they would undoubtedly have made sure that there was actually twice as much creme between the two cookies. Let us recall the famous scene in Big, in which Tom Hanks eats Oreos by licking off the creme center and throwing the cookie part away, proving not only that the creme is the best, but that the food is itself a source of comfort. Would Tom Hanks have eaten Oreos to bring him back to childhood had he known that Nabisco was just another company looking to cheat its customers?
Perhaps the biggest tragedy is the retroactive death of the quadruple stuf Oreos, made by taking apart two double stuf Oreos and putting the two halves together. Today we learn that we were hardly pioneers of an intense cookie experience four times as great as a normal Oreo. Instead we were really eating a cookie that was only just over three times as big as a normal Oreo, and nothing more.
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