It’s Girl Scout Cookie Season. Watch out at the grocery store. A cadre of cute girls may pounce on you—armed with armfuls of legal, expensive, yet tasty WMDs. Try to avoid such an encounter as the earnest girls and their treats are hard to resist. But the world will INFINITELY be a better place if you do.
Girl Scout Cookies ARE indeed weapons of mass destruction. As such, the Girls Scouts of America cannot be considered a decent organization. Its cookie-selling program has gone seriously astray to the point that it’s an immoral blight of global proportions.
Is this an exaggeration? Hardly. Let me count the ways.
1. From a nutritional standpoint the ingredients are dangerous to your health. The cookies are loaded with partially hydrogenated oil (trans fat); palm oil (saturated fat); sugar; high-fructose corn syrup; artificial flavoring, and tertiary butylhydroquinone.
This last item, TBHQ, is a chemical compound that acts as a preservative to give food a longer shelf life (keeps oils from going rancid). It’s used in processed foods like Twinkies and Chicken McNuggets. Likewise, all of the ingredients in Girl Scout Cookies (GSC) can be found in McDonald’s food.
[NOTE: Does anyone think eating McDonald’s food is a good idea? If so, see Super Size Me, Morgan Spurlock’s 2004 documentary. He tired to eat ONLY McDonald’s food for 30 days and it nearly killed him.]
In addition, GSC are the type of “food” that are contributing to the obesity and Type II diabetes epidemic that is ruining the health of Americans as it drives up the cost of health care for all.
2. I take HUGE issue with the use of Palm Oil in the GSC. This oil is a cheap substitute for those who object to the use of trans fat oils, of which Palm Oil is NOT. However, it IS a saturated fat, like lard. It is not heart healthy.
But an even worse aspect of using palm is its harvesting, which was has wreaked an environmental holocaust in the tropical forests of South East Asia and parts of Africa and Central America. The deforestation has increased greenhouse gas emissions, created biodiversity hotspots, and damaged peat lands.
3. The WORST aspect of harvesting palm is its annihilation of endangered species: the Sumatran tiger, Asian rhinoceros, Asian elephant, and the Sumatran and Bornean Orangutans.
It’s the story of the orangutans that is the most HORRIFIC and HEARTBREAKING. These animals eat the palm seedling to survive. However, this interferes with the profit margins on the palm plantations. Consequently, 5,000 orangutans are killed every year in BRUTAL and INHUMANE ways. In addition, there is widespread mayhem, torture, and cruelty inflicted on these amazing animals. It is absolutely sickening.
To the Girls Scouts Mucky Mucks: Shame on you. The selling of your cookies using the above-mentioned ingredients—especially palm oil—is despicable.
To engage the youth of America in selling such deplorable products so you can make a buck is obscene.
You are compromising the moral integrity of American girls and young women.
To borrow a phrase from the late Congressman Tom Lantos, “You are Moral Pygmies.”
And stupid, too, if you cannot come up with a better and more ethical product to sell.
Someone needs to inform the Girl Scouts that they are being fed worse ingredients than their cookies. They’re being made to participate in an activity that KILLS animals, human health, and the environment.
Let them decide for themselves if they wish to continue in this activity.
For the rest of us, say NO to Girl Scout Cookies and you are saying:
NO to health-damaging “food;”
NO to the destruction of the environment; and
NO to the genocide of a species that has 97% the same DNA as humans.
Destroyed rainforests. Destroyed species.
Orphaned and abandoned orangutan babies.
