The World's Healthiest Cookie explains our COVID response
The Today Show, the New York Post, and a bunch of other media outlets just ran a piece on a chef who has created the “World’s Healthiest Cookie.” This purported superfood packs 5 servings of fruits and vegetables into just 280 calories of processed food goodness.
I saw this article, and immediately had a visceral flashback to my days working for Dr. Oz’s show during a year of med school. This is the type of segment that our audience would eat up (pun intended).
At the show, we learned from focus groups that our viewers were constantly searching for the holy grail of weight loss - a diet that lets you eat everything you want in whatever quantites you’d like, but makes you permanently thin, young, and happy without ever doing any exercise.
As you might have guessed, the premise of this is nonsense, but that isn’t going to stop people from buying cookies that they’re convinced will be a panacea for weight loss.
I look at the World’s Healthiest Cookie as a metaphor for the way American society has dealt with the COVID-19 pandemic.
These articles are junk food for your mind just like this cookie is junk food for your body
At the end of the day, a cookie as a health food is magical thinking. This is the epitome of healthwashing, a corollary concept to greenwashing.
Healthwashing is when you take something that’s fundamentally bad for you and add a bunch of presumably healthy items in an effort to make the whole thing seem like it’s good for you.
The cookie-as-health-food concept takes a real life problem - weight gain and an enjoyment of cookies - and tries to reimagine it as something that can be dealt with through magical thinking and a quick-fix solution.
“Just take the cookie and add a bunch of fruits and vegetables to make it healthy” is the dietary equivalent of “the virus is going to magically disappear.”
It’s easier to hope for a magical solution than to do the work it takes to succeed
Testing, contact tracing, and isolation is hard work. It requires setting up a national infrastructure, spending a lot of money, and an unglamorous, sustained effort with delayed results.
Physical distancing makes us all unhappy. We can’t spend time with people we want to and we’re spending more time isolated at home. Many of us are stressed out and depressed as a result.
Wearing a mask is a pain in the ass - it’s hot, itchy, and makes you constantly uncomfortable. But it’s the most effective means of getting life back to a semblance of normal.
I think that on some level, we all know that these things are true. But we’re scared and frustrated and sick of this pandemic.
Outrage about wearing a mask feels similar to patients leaving the hospital against medical advice - it’s a shortsighted way of exerting control of a situation in which you feel like you don’t have any.
It’s almost amazing to watch an entire country fail the marshmallow test
I agree that it’s much easier to hope that the virus will just go away than to do the hard work of setting up a national testing infrastructure.
I agree that it’s much easier to pray for a vaccine to be developed at warp speed than to physically distance and keep schools closed.
I agree that it’s much easier not to wear a mask than to wear one.
I agree that it’s much easier to eat cookies all day than to do deadlifts.
But sometimes you need to do hard work before you can succeed. There’s a reason we don’t lionize taking the easy way out.
I hope that rising COVID caseloads across the country can snap us out of our magical thinking. Just like cookies won’t cure obesity, thoughts and prayers won’t end this pandemic.
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