Oreo No-No

In my book, Oreo starts with a few strikes against it. First off, it's one of the many freaks of modern food science designed to disguise as much government subsidized GMO corn as possible. I also have never liked the texture, at least outside of ice cream. But now I have a new reason to hate the Oreo: it purports to be a tool for racial healing.

In a commercial I recently saw before the unfortunate experience of watching Iron Man, a white man shares an Oreo with his apparently mixed race, Spanish speaking son. The father dopily tries to follow along as his son describes how to eat an Oreo in Spanish, eventually speaking a few shaky words himself. They then share the cookie, thereby closing the cultural gap between them as though it were nothing more than vanilla "cream," which of course is actually sugar and hydrogenated oil, or until recently, lard.

I found two things unsettling about this commercial. The first is the fact that they now subject you to full commercials before a movie. The second is that the advert fails to mention that foods like Oreos are in large part responsible for the plague of diabetes and obesity affecting many lower income, often Spanish speaking families.

Forget local, sustainable and organic; households such as the real life equivalent of the family in the commercial have less and less access to anything that isn't heavily processed. For instance, vegetables. What do they have? Oreos. And now anyone from such a community who saw Iron Man will be that much more likely to eat one.

Also, does Nabisco think their cookie has the validity to become a symbol of racial harmony because of its color scheme? Guess Seinfeld was right.

(photo courtesy of Steve Gorlin)