Kid Not a Cookie Monster Fiend

The realization has come to us slowly that Kina does not like cookies: A molten chocolate chip cookie from Levain, returned to us after a single bite; Oreos stripped of their filling and left for the vultures; jammy thumbprint cookies, eviscerated and crumbled. On its face, this seems blasphemous—a child who doesn’t love cookies? Laurea and I spent the other night wrestling with this, and decided we needed to look for larger patterns. Take, if you will, four desserts: pie, cake, ice cream, and cookies. Without falling into the rabbit hole of specific pies or specific cookies, how would you rank them? Here’s where we landed:

Laurea:

1. Cake

2. Ice cream

3. Cookies

4. Pie

David:

1. Ice cream

2. Pie

3. Cookies

4. Cake

Kina (by extrapolation):

1. Ice cream

2. Cake

3. Pie

4. Cookies

By looking deep within ourselves, you can see that we’ve uncovered some uncomfortable truths (some about society, others about ourselves). First, and perhaps most notably, you see the central rift in my relationship with Laurea: we have divergent feelings about cake. This has cropped up periodically, usually in non-birthday settings in which no reasonable person would choose to eat cake, though Laurea almost always opts for it. Cake is fine, of course; I don’t dislike cake, per se, but it’s like eggnog—there’s a time and place. We’ve been married now for twelve years, and it’s shocking to me that this hasn’t ruined our marriage, and so we count ourselves lucky now to have discovered this. By intentionally casting light on such a critical flashpoint, I feel like we’ve saved ourselves from a slow descent into divorce. We will always have ice cream. I digress.

The true lesson of this dessert ranking, with its highly-reliable sample size of three people, is that nobody thinks cookies are the best dessert. In our study, they get an average rating of 3.33…. with threes rolling off into infinity, a rating that cannot stop reminding you of its own mediocrity. There are ice cream parlors and cake shops and pie counters, but cookie stores are a folly. A business cannot be built on cookies alone; they must be surrounded by muffins, buns, or (let’s face it) tiny cakes. While delicious, cookies are at best a dessert eaten because there was too much other good food to eat, their strongest argument for existing being that they are small; pie-sized cookies, we can all agree, are grotesqueries of the highest order, and cannot compete with their more formal counterparts. The central debate around dessert is not Cake or Pie or Cookies—one either prefers cake or pie. (All agree, of course, that ice cream would never deign to enter into such a pointless argument.) Why are there always holiday cookie parties at work? The only reasonable answer: they keep.

So perhaps it is not such a calamity that Kina ruins, mistreats, ignores, and refuses cookies. She’s merely being honest, having not yet been trained to politely nibble on a cookie at the interstices between meals. The marketing machine behind Big Cookie hasn’t gotten to her, by which I mean: Cookie Monster. The best thing about Cookie Monster is his shameless public enjoyment of dessert—he is the id of sweet things. But because Cookie is made of felt and fur, and because he has frequently has only one working hand, he cannot eat large desserts or wet desserts. What’s left? You guessed it. Listen, if you look carefully, even Cookie Monster isn’t really eating the cookies; he’s ruining them, just like Kina. Nobody really loves cookies—the best thing about them is Cookie Monster, and Kina just doesn’t like blue things that much.

dad