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Early Onset Palate Puberty

merican culinary culture is very particular about categorizing its food. There's breakfast food and dinner food, and never the twain shall meet, unless you're real drunk or real hungover. There's also kid food and adult food. Just as we eventually outgrow sugary cereals, cartoon-shaped canned pastas, and yogurt snacks of a color not found in nature, we don't expect children to embrace more sophisticated flavors and subtle nuances like watermelon foam or roasted garlic mousse timbales. Kids should be exposed to new flavors, but with the idea that new taste sensations await them in adulthood. Pepperidge Farm always seemed to grasp this concept. They are, to be blunt, a cookie company. But the cookies they make are no Chips Ahoy or Circus Animals. Marketed with terms like Distinctive and Indulgent, there are no hyper mascots on these bags. These are serious cookies for times when grownups need to eat their pain. Early in my relationship with my Death Muffin, I caught a nasty cold and begged off on one of our dates. He came over anyway, armed with orange juice, chicken soup, and a bag of Pepperidge Farm Chessmen butter cookies. I was touched. No one had ever bought me grownup cookies before. One of their most pretentious offerings is the Pirouette. "Long, slender, graceful..." reads the blurb on the Pepperidge Farm website. Yes! That's exactly what I aspire to! (Never mind that long, slender, and graceful women do not stuff their faces with cookies.) Impossibly thin wafers are rolled into tiny tubes, filled with a ganache, and sold in what amounts to a coffee can. Absolutely no Snap, Crackle, or Pop to be found here. Until now, when Kellogg's has breached this gentlemen's agreement with the introduction of Cereal Straws. These are essentially hollow Pirouettes being sold to kids as a milk-sucking Diabetes Helper. They come in two flavors, chocolate and "froot", and have familiar brightly colored characters on the box to remind you they're for the GoGurt crowd. I call shenanigans! Keep your sticky attention-deficient mitts out of my cookies! I suppose soon I'll be expected to share my booze with them too? Maker's Mark does not taste the same out of a sippy cup.