How the cookie crumbles

As everyone is no doubt aware, Bon Appétit has been selling sugar cookies for the past week or so on campus. These cookies are shaped like either a highly-stylized donkey or an equally-stylized elephant. The donkeys are blue with a “B” lovingly hand-icinged on their torso. The elephants are red with a “P” slightly-less-lovingly hand-icinged on their abdomen.

These cookies are obviously representative of something, but what? Perhaps the sign accompanying them can shed some light on this mystery. Of course! They’re for the upcoming vice presidential debate to be held on campus. I guess they are there to make sure that no one has forgotten that we’ll be having Very Important People here soon.

What’s that? They’re keeping track of how many of each type of cookie are sold? Wow. We should do all our voting like that. Just imagine: I now introduce you to president-elect Betty Crocker. Nestlé will be serving as her Prime Minister and E.L. Fudge has been elected king. Because everyone knows that once you switch to cookie-based voting, you become an electoral monarchy.

Just looking at the first two days’ trends, it seems as though the Republicans had a slight edge. I can think of two reasons for this. First of all, the elephant cookies are bigger than the donkey cookies, which makes good anatomical (if not representational) sense. And secondly, who wouldn’t want to eat Sarah Palin?

Then, when signs were put up saying that Bon Appétit was keeping track of how much we ate, the Democrats shot up. This can only lead to one conclusion: the Democrats (or at least their cookies) are shameless prostitutes, literally selling themselves for the enjoyment of others.

All joking aside, I recently valiantly set out to settle this cookie election all by myself and find out for once and for all just which cookie deserves to win. To this end, I bought each type of cookie.

Now, I know what you’re going to say about the ethics, or the lack thereof, of this experiment. Yes, I know I threw off the percentages by buying an amount of cookies not proportional to the ratio of total cookies sold of each type. And yes, buying a single donkey cookie would not make up in the numbers game for all the elephant cookies I had for breakfast when Bear’s Den was out of biscuits and I was in a rush. Your protestations fall on deaf ears. This is my experiment, and I’m going to run it however I please.

So I brought my cookies to my room, and since I wasn’t hungry, I did the only sensible thing: put them on my desk and forgot about them. A few days later, I found the donkey in the pile of miscellany that is my desk (taking a quick survey right now, I have a schedule for something, a French assignment, an audition sheet, a lamp, a mirror wrapped in bubble paper, a roll of painter’s tape, the Vampire Weekend CD, the 2009 Guide to St. Louis, the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy complete radio plays, a deck of cards, my laptop and whatever’s buried underneath all of that). Its head was coming off and some of the blue sugar had rubbed off onto the plastic bag. ‘Oh well,’ I thought as I ate it anyway. It tasted suspiciously like the elephant cookies.

Not being one to trust my suspicions, though, I decided that I would finish the experiment then and there with the donkey taste still fresh in my mouth. I bit into my elephant and was disturbed to find that they tasted exactly the same.

If I had to guess, I would say that the same crap goes into each cookie, but they each have a different colored sugar coating. So I guess it really is a perfect metaphor.