Mmmm...Cookies!

Those of you lucky enough to be staying in Europe might be getting a notification related to cookies on this blog. It seems that while I was away, a new EU ruling has come into effect that requires me to tell everyone what my cookie policy is, where I stand on the use of cookies and also give an additional disclosure in case I’m employing any third party cookies. The blog dashboard goes on to state that Google has been nice enough to put out a cookie notification for me already, but not being in Europe, it’s impossible for me to see what this is. Still, Google somewhat unfairly insists that I will be held responsible in case it isn’t visible or is inaccurate in any way and, god forbid, an EU resident is left in the dark as to the exact nature of my relationship with these cookies.

So yes, cookies. At the risk of over simplification, my cookie policy is to eat it. I don’t really know what else to do with cookies. I’m not quite sure what sort of an employee a cookie would make (would probably crumble under pressure!), so I haven’t employed any cookies, leave alone third party ones. I wish that I could say technologically advanced, big-brotherly things like I’m using cookies so that I can track your browsing preferences and customize the blog experience to better meet your needs, even though I’m secretly selling all this data to advertisers in exchange for money or to help them manipulate your online behaviour in sinister ways, but I honestly couldn’t be bothered.

In fact, I’m not even much of a cookie person – I’m really more of a chips person. Now, I know cookies have a lot going for them – melt in your mouth butter, choicest flour that’s baked to perfection, and, if you were to believe the old Parle Milano ad, bodily fluids exchanged between Hrithik Roshan and a woman with a fake Italian accent. But I’m a chips junkie through and through. If I had a dietary kryptonite it would probably be chips, but then again it isn’t as if I’m strong enough in the nutritional intake department to warrant a kryptonite. If I was blessed with unshakeable willpower or had a dietary regime of unparalleled Spartan-ness, it would be fair to say that chips is my kryptonite – but for someone with a fairly unhealthy track record of junk food consumption it would just sound absurd. Still, I’m one of the few people that would try out any new chips that happened to make its way on to a store shelf – from brands large and obscure to the hot chip shops, there isn’t any kind of chips I haven’t partaken of. Even if a brand came out with a flavour that sounded downright disgusting like ‘Toothpaste & Orange Juice’, that I know will taste utterly vile, I’ll give it a gander just to be sure. Special edition flavours to commemorate random occasions like world cups or the changing of the seasons, short-lived experiments on the chips front that sank without a trace – I’ve tried them all!

Now, in most cases advertising tends to make outlandish promises and make a product seem life-changing – think deo ads that’ll have women swarming like flies around you or tea ads that’ll turn you into a conscientious, do-gooder citizen. In truth, you’ll maybe smell a little better (or worse, if it’s the wrong deo) or feel mildly better in the middle of a boring workday. In the case of Lay’s and me, though, it’s the opposite – the tagline ‘No one can eat just one’ is about the most massive understatement you’d ever encounter. Now, if the tagline were changed to “No one can eat a hundred and then feel all sick and nauseated but still do exactly the same thing pretty much every single time”, it would probably be somewhere in the general vicinity of what would constitute ground reality. In fact the wife justifiably worries that she might one day wake up and find herself lying next to a giant potato chip.

Maybe my indifference to cookies and love for chips is rooted in the fact that I pretty much don’t have a sweet tooth at all. All the excitement for dessert and chocolates that drive deleterious food habits for most people is instead channeled into an equally destructive hankering for chips and instant noodles in my case. My meals are always calibrated such that there’s barely any space left for dessert – so I rarely end up having more than a spoon or two of it. That is why, when Pink Floyd sang “You can’t have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat”, I was utterly flummoxed. Sure, I love Pink Floyd and was willing to follow their guidelines on the correct order of food intake, but why would one even want pudding when there was meat? All I could think was “Hey! That’s just perfect, thank you very much. I’ll gladly have all the meat and skip the pudding.”