Keeping the world safe, one cookie at a time

The other day I was in a baking mood, so I whipped up a couple batches of cookies. My daughter asked me if I was the Keebler elf.

Which remInded me that I have a story about Keebler to share.

Last fall, I was eating a bag of Pecan Sandies – I mean I was eating a cookie from the bag – okay, two cookies from the bag – when I looked at the packaging and realized it wasn’t tamper-proof. Right on the package, it said NEW Easy Open, Easy Close and the big deal was that you could just peel back the top of the package and when you were done, you could smooth the top back and it would adhere again. Yup, that was definitely easy open and easy close. Too much so, in fact. I experimented and lined up the top exactly where it was before it was opened and you couldn’t tell it had been opened.

Being both an old-fashioned paranoid mom and a novelist who spends days thinking about how to murder someone without leaving a trace, I was alarmed by the Pecan Sandies packaging. If I could sneak a cookie out of the package without anyone being the wiser, how hard could it be for some crazed homicidal maniac to take out a cookie, taint it, and re-insert it into the pack? For the safety of children everywhere (as well as us cookie-eating adults), all packages need to be completely tamper-proof.

I sent an email to Keebler and explained my concern.  I also explained that I was a mystery writer who routinely thought about things like this, lest they think I was a homicidal maniac who planned to take out a cookie, taint it, and re-insert it into a pack.

Then I remembered we had Oreos in the house, too, so I had to check them out. Sure enough, it had the same NEW Easy Open Pull Tab. Taking my life in my hands, I ate a few of them, too, but nothing happened, other than that I suddenly wanted to eat more of them.

So I sent an email to Nabisco as well.

Guess what? The last package of Oreos I bought had a new addition to the NEW Easy Open Pull Tab package – there is now a red square next to the top where it peels back that says SEALED: Slit appears when opened. And by jingo, it does. You open a bag of Oreos and that slit appears right through the word SEALED. No tampering is going to get by that bag.

Although I do wonder what they put in those Oreos. It’s really hard to eat just one, you know. Okay, it’s hard to eat just two…