How Many Pushups in a Cookie?

Are there any living cultures on our planet that do not celebrate some version of the cookie? I would guess so, but experience with guessing tells me I’m likely wrong. If there are any cookie-less cultures out there, I’m curious to know what fills this vacuum of delight, and where I could try it.

Do yourself a favor and picture your favorite cookie. Hold it in your mind, warm, fragrant, and yours to share or devour as you choose. I envision a thing of complex splendor. My mental cookie is big. Not too thin, not too thick, about the size of a tea plate, with an evenly distributed center and fanned-out, crispy edges. It’s also, possibly, the least cookie-like and most derided of them all - oatmeal raisin (the carrot-cake of cookies). But you choose what you want. That said, I’m not picky. I’ll eat them cold, warm, fresh, old, thin, fat, free, or purchased.

As for flavor, come on, you can’t go wrong. Fruity, nutty, chocolatey, peanut buttery, caramel-flecked, seasonally spiced, or plain ol’ sugar - you bake it, I’ll try it. When made with fruit, specifically raisins tumbled in batter and then roasted to their most sugary expression, my mind turns to worship. Chocolate chips, whether white or dark, mostly melted in the meat of the cookie, are as agreeable to the tooth as to the taste bud. When peanut butter is whipped into the mix, the familiar and rounded flavor amplifies the experience to intoxication by cookie. Caramel, my least favorite, with its sticky pop, is still a treat worth considering as long as the supporting flavors have a chance to shine.

Of course, there is another essential ingredient that makes cookies so special - imagination. I could no sooner separate cookies from my imagination than I could return a ginger snap to separate piles of egg, flour, butter, molasses, and spices. I remember the cookies of my grandmother and the cookies of my neighbors. I can recall the stale ones brought to school by the embarrassed children of overly ambitious parents. And I remember the ones I pulled from plastic sleeves, dunked in milk, and devoured by the pound. But most of all, I remember the one I ate most recently, and this is where, as the saying goes, the cookie crumbles.

Thanks to my muddled understanding of human frailty, entropy, and decrepitude, my relationship to the cookie has been complicated. At some point in my life, my dumb-ass thirties most likely, I began listening to, what I call, anti-cookie propaganda. Specifically, the wet blanket warnings of sinewy muscle dorks who shamelessly toss around words like neurotransmitter or nucleotide. Their confident drivel drapes my psyche like a sugar-free protein shake spilled on a kettlebell.

Was there really a time in my life when my mind was free to consider the cookie only for its flavor and availability? Yes, and it was terrific. Now I can’t even type the word without being plagued by buzz-kill dietary considerations. What is sugar’s impact on the gut, the tooth, the mood, or the brain? What about the empty calories, the visceral fat, cardiac arrest, clogged arteries, decay, excess, overfeeding, and plain old sticky-fingered sloppiness? What about dopamine or cortisol? Oh, my poor neurotransmitters!

What is a thinking man to do? There must be room for cookies in life, no? Many billions have come before me, living, loving, baking, and dying that I might be free to enjoy the fruits of their labor. This unbroken chain of survival stretching from me to the single-celled organisms of old - does it not beg me to enjoy the ride while it lasts? Surely it would be an insult to eschew the crispy, sweet treat of my dreams for some empty promise of timeless health and wellness. One can’t live forever, and if one could deny these pleasures in exchange for longevity, it wouldn’t be worth it, right?

Of course, I understand it’s best to find the middle path. Whether it’s heroin, exercise, cookies, or radiation, sensible doses are recommended. But grim warnings from the aggressively healthy are hard to ignore. Every cookie, refused or consumed, shoulders the dark burden of their joyless advice.

It feels like I should be reaching for a confection-based metaphor here, or perhaps a symbol reflecting my emotional connection to the existence of cookies across time and space, to some grand lesson, or insight. Something along the lines of not overstuffing the middle, feathering the edges, or leaving space on the baking sheet - cookies as vessels of both hope and despair - the tension between joy and guilt. I think I usually would, but honestly, I can’t get into it. All I really want to do is eat the goddamn cookie. I want it without guilt, without shame, and without concern for how many preceded it, or how many will follow.

Unfortunately, the ingredients in my recipe won’t let me abandon concern altogether. I suppose I will reach for a simile here: like a cookie, I am what I am. Put in as many chocolate chips as you want; if there’s even a little peanut butter in there, it’s a peanut butter cookie. So what sort of thing am I if I burn carbs slower than I turn bad news into marching orders? I may have a liberal sprinkling of self-control, but a dollop of craven debauchery makes me what I am – a self-loathing cookie-eater who can’t wait to do it all again, real soon.

So, I’ll keep an ear to the ground for that cookie-free culture. The one who miraculously managed to combine delectable indulgence and rarity without the attendant guilt of cookie-craft. In the meantime, as I search, I’ll continue to trade pushups for sugar, deep knee bends for chocolate, and try to convince myself that the “C” in vitamin C stands for cookie.