Girl Scout Cookies...or Satan's Biscuits?

It's that time of the year again....the time that the Scouts of America website claims, "The activity of selling cookies is directly related to our purpose of helping all girls realize their full potential and become strong, confident, and resourceful citizens."

At every grocery store, school dropoff, gymnastics class, and kid soccer game, I have been accosted by hordes of pre-teens blinking hopefully at me as they shove stubby pencils and blurry order forms my way. By selling enough of these cholesterol bombs, they'll qualify to win prizes... er, I mean, build greater life skills. As most of these children are the spawn of my friends, I feel obligated to sign up.

Life skills don't come cheap. To be exact, they cost $4.00 per box. In this economic environment, I don't really need to be blowing $24 of my discretionary on cookies that I don't even like.
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On the health front, although I don't think I've ever personally ever eaten an actual cookie (they look like decorated Styrofoam), I usually bring them to the office and leave them out for all to plunder... thereby fostering the obesity epidemic, and contributing to our national health crisis.

And then there's the environmental impact of the discarded packaging clogging our nation's landfills...and the questionable ability of a Trefoil to actually decompose in a garbage bin, much less digest in a stomach.

It has implications in our post-feminist culture as well. I'm a working mother, raising a daughter that I hope will be strong, smart, and possibly take an interest in business as a career path someday. As such I take umbrage with the whole concept of cookies for cash. Isn't this a subversive attempt to convince women to stay in the kitchen where neoconservatives think they belong? Can't we encourage our daughters to find passion in entrepreneurship OUTSIDE of the domestic arts?

And finally, I find something vaguely racist about the "Samosas". Not sure where you all net out there.