“Consider the Oreo cookie,” wrote Harlan Ellison. “Mealy. Chocolate only in the same way that an H-bomb blast-effect is a suntan. Mendacious, meretricious, monstrously mouth-clotting…it is anti-cookie, the baked good personification of the AntiChrist.”
He described the cream filling as “corpse-white adhesive,” as “bird doo-doo,” and, perhaps most memorably, as “loathsome diabetes-inducing spackling compound.”
What he really had a thing for was Hydrox: the “Stabat Mater of junk food.”
You remember Hydrox, don’t you? They were not only first on the scene—pre-dating Oreos by four years—but also, by most accounts anyway (or at least Ellison’s), superior in every conceivable way. Too bad about the name, though.
People tell me that a good name can make all the difference. Can it, though? I mean, it’s not like “Oreo” is a great name or anything—it’s that “Hydrox” is terrible. It’s like the difference between Ritz and Hi-Ho, another battle between Sunshine and Nabisco. Who wants to eat a Hi-Ho? Nobody, that’s who. I don’t care how much better they taste. Gimme a Ritz every time. And lest you think this is some sort of anti-Sunshine blog, we here at helveticka world headquarters—like the rest of the civilized world—are all about the Cheez-Its.
