HUMOR – Do not stress about genetically-modified food. Never mind your worries over pink slime. I have a recently learned of a much larger fish that the FDA needs to fry: Nabisco’s so-called “Double Stuf” Oreo cookies.

Dan Anderson, a math teacher in Queensbury, N.Y., assigned his students to test Nabisco’s double-stuffed claim. By comparing the mass of the “stuf” of 10 regular, 10 Double Stuf, and 10 Mega Stuf Oreos, as well as 5 barren Oreo wafers, Anderson’s class came to this disheartening conclusion:  Double Stuf Oreos are only 1.86 stuffed.

Perhaps Nabisco’s use of the word “stuf” should have tipped us off to the fallacy of their claim, similar to the way bottled, aerosol cheese is labeled “cheez” and how fruit cereals use the word “froot” on their labels. I do not think there is any fruit or cheese or stuff in any of these “foods.” I am no lawyer, but I think I see the makings of a class action lawsuit. I want retribution for the .14 of “stuf” that myself and countless Oreo consumers have paid for and not received.

In response to Anderson’s findings, a spokeswoman for Mondelez International, Nabisco’s parent company, made this claim:

“While I’m not familiar with what was done in the classroom setting, I can confirm for you that our recipe for the Oreo Double Stuf Cookie has double the Stuf, or creme filling, when compared with our base, or original Oreo cookie.”

Understandably, these findings have caused a frenzy of online debate and speculation because there is nothing that Internet users love more than to debate, speculate, and cause frenzies over nonissues. I know that is my favorite thing to do when I am online.

So, as a concerned Oreo connoisseur, I did what any normal person does when he or she is faced with a personal crisis of this magnitude: I ate a bowl of mint chocolate chip ice cream and then I got to the bottom of the Oreo debacle by jumping fingers-first into the online debate.

As it turns out, there are literally “tens of people” who are engaged in an ongoing online dispute over the validity of Anderson’s claim that Double Stuf Oreos are only 1.86 stuffed.

For example, Chris Lusto, another mathematically-gifted person who is passionate about Oreos, seems to have proven definitively that Double Stuf Oreos do, in fact, have double the “stuf.”

Lusto’s findings are so compelling that I am inclined to question everything I have ever read on Huffington Post, not to mention the rest of the Internet. My world has been turned upside down.

Am I not to believe everything I read on the Internet? Am I to understand that online debate and speculation does not alter the truth in any way, it only serves to breed contention and siphon away precious time? Am I to understand that engaging in social media frenzy does not do anything to solve first-world OR real-world problems?

I am going to need another bowl of mint chocolate chip ice cream while I think about this. And maybe a box of 1.86 stuffed Oreos.

 

Elise Haynes chronicles family life in her blog Haynes Family Yard Sale. Any opinions stated in this column are her own and not necessarily those of St. George News.

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