Oreo heist may be the most delicious of misdeeds

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This article was published 06/03/2019 (2764 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Normally, I’m a hard-core law-and-order kind of guy, but I have a lot of sympathy and understanding for John William Crowell.

For the record, Crowell is a 27-year-old Fargo, N.D., man facing one Class A felony count of theft of property after being accused of stealing a semi-trailer truck and trailer outside a Hornbacher’s supermarket.

According to the Bismarck Tribune, the semi’s driver told police he left the truck running while he went into the store to fill out some paperwork. When he returned five minutes later, the semi and its cargo were nowhere in sight.

I know what you are thinking. You are thinking: “What is wrong with you, Doug? How can you feel sympathetic for a naughty person who is accused of making off with a truck that didn’t belong to him?”

You make an excellent point, but perhaps you will be a touch more understanding when I inform you the truck in question was loaded to the gills (assuming trucks have gills) with Oreo cookies.

Call me a left-leaning bleeding heart if you must, but my heart goes out to someone who made a bad decision when confronted with a truck filled to the brim (I am positive trucks have brims) with my all-time favourite cookie, which happens to be the bestselling cookie in the entire world, a cookie that racked up US$3.28 billion in sales in 2014 alone.

I am feeling especially understanding of cookie-related crimes today, because — brace yourselves for an unexpected sugar rush — today, March 6, just happens to be National Oreo Cookie Day, a day set aside for us to celebrate all things Oreo.

“National Oreo Day is celebrated on March 6th because that is when the term Oreo was first used on the trademark forms in 1912. Once people realized this little fact, the day was quickly turned into a holiday,” the website holidayscalendar.com states.

Despite being a crusading newspaper columnist with naturally curly hair and steely blue eyes, I have a long history of making poor nutritional choices, and I have been addicted to Oreo cookies for as long as I can remember.

Before we talk about that, however, I can tell by the look in your eyes and the drool on your chin that you have a burning question, namely: just how many (bad word) Oreos were inside that truck allegedly stolen in Fargo late last year?

Fortunately for us, someone did the math. According to a report by Nick Broadway of WDAY News, “a 3.29-pound box of Oreos purchased at the store contains 132 cookies, and according to Nabisco, one pallet of Oreos weighs 1,032 pounds.

“Assuming the truck-trailer was filled with the standard-size Oreo cookies, one pallet would have about 41,405 cookies on it. Multiply that number by six — the number of pallets court documents said were in the trailer — and that brings the total to 248,430 cookies. With nearly a quarter of a million cookies possibly in the trailer, more than 13 million calories could have been on board.”

I do not know what the cookie crook thought he was going to do with all those Oreos, but I know exactly what I would have done. By way of a clue, here’s a taste of the famous Oreo jingle from the 1980s: “Cause a kid’ll eat the middle of an Oreo first. And save the chocolate cookie outside for last.”

So, yes, like millions of other Oreo addicts, I would have unscrewed the delicious chocolate-cookie wafers, scooped out the vanilla-creme filling and made a single Oreo that was roughly 190 per cent filling and 0.05 per cent cookie outside, as compared with a standard Oreo that, statistically speaking, is 71 per cent cookie and only 29 per cent creme filling.

Once again, I can tell by the dreamy look on your faces that most of you know exactly what I am talking about, which explains why Nabisco has just released the biggest, baddest Oreo of them all, something called the “Most Stuf,” which contains something like three times the vanilla filling of your standard Oreo.

I should point out that as I write these words, I am attempting to consume an entire 500-gram package of the original Oreo, because I was unable to find the really fat Oreos in my grocery store, and also because I am something of a snack purist, meaning I eschew the weird flavours, such as Carrot Cake Oreos or Cinnamon Bun Oreos or Key Lime Pie Oreos or Pumpkin Spice Oreos, to name just a few.

I am also a courageous journalist in the sense that I am bravely writing today’s unsolicited column about celebrating National Oreo Cookie Day, despite the real possibility the nice people at Nabisco might threaten to send me several truckloads (hopefully not via Fargo) of free cookies.

Because, seriously, who does not love Oreos? According to a gaggle of news reports, a 2013 scientific study at Connecticut College discovered Oreos are as addictive as cocaine — at least for lab rats. They discovered eating Oreos excited more neurons in the pleasure centre of a rat’s brain than did exposure to cocaine.

These cookies apparently affect pigs the same way, because I am holding in my hands news reports stating that a pet pot-bellied pig named Charlotte escaped her owner’s home in Middletown, Ohio, last week, and was escorted back home by police armed with Oreos.

The news stories say that when Charlotte was reported missing, they set up a barricade (I’m guessing there’s not a lot of major crime in Middletown) and then used a pack of Oreos, the pig’s favourite snack, to lure her close enough to snap on the leash.

So get ready to celebrate today, kids, with the following two-step party plan:

1: Go to the store and buy some Oreos;

2: Go wee wee wee all the way home!

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca