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Our family's Girl Scout is getting ready to sell cookies. We picked up about 200 boxes of cookies today and she's allowed to start selling them tomorrow. My boyfriend, who ran 7 miles before picking up the cookies, came home and immediately opened a box of Tagalongs - the chocolate peanut butter ones that I remember begging my mom for as a kid. She didn't like to buy them because very few cookies come in each box, compared to the other varieties of Girl Scout cookies. Fortunately, my post-run hungry boyfriend saved me 2 cookies, which I eagerly ate. Then I reflected: Hmm, they aren't that good. Not very chocolatey, and not even very peanuty. Mostly they are sugary. Yet, they got my sweet tooth going, so I opened up a box of Do-Si-Dos, the peanut butter sandwich cookies. Those were a disappointment too. Same complaint: too sugary.
Then I looked at the ingredients. The reason the Tagalong box doesn't mention chocolate (it calls them "peanut butter patties") is because, by law, they aren't made with chocolate. There's a tiny bit of cocoa powder in them but no cocoa butter at all. The first few ingredients are:
Peanuts, sugar, vegetable oil (partially hydrogenated palm, palm kernel, and/or cottonseed oil, soybean and palm oil, hydrogenated palm, soybean, and cottonseed oil)...
The nutrition label claims no trans-fat, as the government allows any product with under 0.5g trans-fat per serving to do so. But there's trans-fat in there all right. Same with the Do-Si-Dos.
I love Girl Scouts and I love that my boyfriend's daughter is a Girl Scout. I was a Girl Scout until high school (I even got my Silver Award). My boyfriend's daughter has a great troop and their activities add a lot to her life. But seriously, there's got to be a better way to raise money. Either less junky cookies, or something other than cookies entirely. Done right, fundraising can be a helpful teaching exercise for the girls - like if they sold Fair Trade products and learned why they were helping people in far off places (Equal Exchange offers a fundraising program complete with a curriculum to teach kids about Fair Trade).
Our Girl Scout is a little bit young to understand why these cookies aren't healthy. We can try to explain about trans-fat, but honestly, it hurts me to have to explain to her that an organization that she views as good is selling cookies that are bad. So we'll buy a few boxes and dole them out slowly, as treats. Just like we did with Halloween candy. After a few weeks, the kids will hopefully forget about it. But in the meantime, what do we do with these 200 boxes of cookies? Now we're complicit in peddling junk too. I hope Girl Scouts can truly find something better than cookies to use as a fundraiser.
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