Golden Oreos: A Review and an Admonition

How are you supposed to eat these things? White filling first?

No manufacturer with a time-honored brand is content to maintain that trademark in its original state anymore. It must be endlessly transformed, repurposed, and diddled with -- no matter that new iterations may eat away at the reputation of the original branding.

What happened to the chocolate?

Oreo cookies are a case in point. They were perfect as they were. Having vanquished their longtime rival Hydrox, they stood at the head of a field that contained no other competitors.

In fact, so famous were they that every pretentious little bakeshop in the city sought to make their own "improved" version of the iconic cookie. And every schoolkid with a lunch box could be seen, around 11:30 a.m., twisting the halves to separate "creme" from wafer, eating the white stuff first, and the cookies -- sometimes dipped in milk -- afterward. Oreos had long since gone from being just a snack to a lifestyle.

The last big mistake

The cookie was invented in 1912 looking very similar to its appearance today. In the past, the company (once Nabisco, now Kraft Foods Global) tried the same cookie with twice as much frosting, presumably aimed at hedonists. Other diddlings over the years included fudge-covered Oreos (1987), Christmas Oreos (1991), and Halloween Oreos (1995).

Now, the world's best-selling branded cookie, with around 400 billion sold since inception, has launched its worst innovation ever: a version without any chocolate at all. Who in their right minds would decide to make the world's most well-known chocolate cookie sans chocolate?

Well, Kraft Global did. The molds used to make the wafers have been reused, so that the cookie looks the same, only fantastically bleached out, as if it had been sitting in the sun in, say, Aruba, for a few months. The creme is apparently the same. The result is a bland cookie with none of the chocolaty grit of the original, in which a rather rancid-tasting artificial vanilla provides the predominant flavor note.

Yes, these cookies suck. And the fact that they're called Oreos sucks even more.

It takes virtually no willpower to eat only one, and push the rest back in the box.

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