Girl Scout Cookies Are Safe!

We were out the other day and tried the new Girl Scout Thin Mint Frosties. Sena got chocolate and I got vanilla. We thought they were delicious. Wendy’s partnered with Girl Scouts of the USA to serve them up and it’s a great idea. They’re swirled and topped with a mint-flavored cookie crumble sauce.

We heard that the Girl Scouts would be out selling their famous cookies the same day at booths outside different stores across Iowa including Iowa City, but we couldn’t find them that day. Maybe it was because it was a little cold to be standing outside in a booth. Interestingly today, the girl scout didn’t know this whole idea was a collaboration between Wendy’s and the Girl Scouts of America.

We finally found a website that posted a schedule of when and where the cookies would be selling.

The weird thing is just before Sena left to get some Thin Mints cookies, we found a news story on the web which raised an alarm about whether or not they are poisonous (they’re not), if you can imagine that. People have been buying Girl Scout cookies for years and I’ve never heard of any problems.

So, it occurred to me that even though we’re not employees of the federal government, we could find 5 things to say relevant to the Department of Gustatory Explorations (DOGE) as part of our frivolous investigation of this issue. I think I’ve got that department name right.

1. It turns out there’s a group called Moms Across America which has partnered with an outfit called GMOScience and they’re calling out Girls Scout of America for selling cookies with “toxic” metals and glyphosate (an herbicide). In their own small, unpublished, non-peer reviewed study, they tested some cookies and found they all had some traces of these substances. They tested cookies including Thin Mints in 3 states which included Iowa.
2. Snopes investigated and found a number of facts, one of which is that “a child would have to eat 9,000 cookies in a day to approach harmful levels of pesticide or naturally occurring metals.”
3. The FDA says you can safely eat the Thin Mints and any of the other kinds of Girl Scout cookies. On the other hand, I will not eat cookies containing coconut because it has the consistency of little pieces of cellophane, which I would chew endlessly without ever being able to bring myself to swallow them. This is a personal idiosyncrasy that has nothing intrinsically to do with any food containing coconut.
4. Don Huber is a retired Purdue University professor of plant pathology who is part of the anti-GMO movement. He’s made many claims which have been criticized and refuted, even by Purdue University faculty members. One of them is that glyphosate causes a number of diseases including Alzheimer’s disease and he claims his ideas are supported by the research of a Maharishi movement expert in yogic flying. By the way there is a Maharishi International University (MIU) located in Fairfield, Iowa. You can learn transcendental meditation there and read about yogic flying (more like hopping) in an interesting 2016 NPR article but you won’t find anything in the curriculum per se on their website about levitation (but you will if you search for the term “yogic flying”). Consequently, you won’t learn dad jokes about this, including but not limited to “Help, I’ve levitated and I can’t get down!”
5. The Girl Scout cookies and the Frosties taste great.

Well, I think that about wraps it up for DOGE.