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I remember eating those cookies at my grandmother's house. Fabulous essay. I didn't know that about House on the Cerulean Sea. Gross.

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Jan 30, 2023
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Those cookies were so gross! I was a fat little glutton who happily ate total garbage and even I knew they were gross. Ugh, 90s diet snack food was the worst. Remember that low-fat potato chip that gave people explosive diarrhea?

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Jan 31, 2023
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The butthole-ruining potato chip was made with something called Olestra. It was a type of oil designed to just go through you so you wouldn't absorb the fat. By going through you, I mean just that--it would rocket straight out of your digestive system. What a mess!

My mom was a big hippy junk food person, too. She thought if something was organic it was automatically healthier. She inflicted carob on us so many times! You ever try carob? It was thought of as a healthy alternative to chocolate, but they'd prepare it with lots of milk and sugar just like chocolate so it wasn't any better for you, it just tasted weird and disappointing.

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I remember Olestra/Olean! Never had the pleasure though. How on earth did they not test that enough to know it would happen, first? Maybe I'm just being naïve here.

Apparently carob is showing up in new Portuguese cooking now, but carob qua carob, not as a stand-in for cocoa. Never had the pleasure of carob, either.

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