Recently in our basement-made-office we have experienced an influx in Girl Scout cookies, as the girls upstairs are all girl scouts, and our company was goodly enough to purchase some from them. Yesterday, one of my co-workers who is by all accounts in fantastic shape generally was lamenting his lack of restraint in eating a box and a half of the ironically named Caramel De Lites, formerly Samoas. These bits of chocolate, caramel, shortbread, and coconut are quite tasty and come in a box with 16 of the treats. After hearing my Jon complain about eating them, we took a look at the back of the box.
A serving size of 2 cookies (1/8th of a box) contains 140 calories, 13g of sugar, 7g of fat, with 6g of saturated fat; all told, Jon had just eaten 1680 calories, 156g of sugar, and 348% of his daily intake of saturated fat. By comparison, you would need to eat 5.6 McDonald’s cheeseburgers to get the calories, 3.55 Hot Carmel Sundaes for the sugar, and a whopping (no pun intended) 20.57 Large Fries to get the saturated fat.
Isn’t a bit odd that in a country with epidemic-level obesity we are sending out our daughters peddling foods like this? What sort of lesson are we teaching children by giving them a quota of junk food to sell? While I think that sending the girls out into the neighborhood to talk to their community and try and raise money is commendable (although it is arguable that much of this goes on anymore), wouldn’t they get the same benefits from going out and directly raising money for their organization? The net profit on a box of cookies that goes for $3.50 is around 50-60 cents; is it really that much easier to sell 10 boxes of cookies than to solicit a $5 donation?
