Used to be, it was pretty safe to walk past the cookie section at a natural foods store. There was very little that was tempting – it all seemed to be designed as “treats” for the sad offspring of parents who were terrified to let little Madison and Joshua put anything in their mouths that might be remotely fun.

Well, I took a wrong turn down an aisle at Whole Foods recently and, boy, things have changed. A lot of this stuff is surely way too fancy (and expensive) to be meant for junk-deprived kiddies. And here’s the thing: these natural products ought to have a real fighting chance to be delicious. Because when I read the box, I see real ingredients that I would use to bake at home: butter, vanilla extract, sugar… rather than extra-high-test corn syrup and multisyllabic words that would be more at home on a Periodic Table of Industrial Foodstuffs.

I zeroed in on the cute (and not too large) boxes and cute name of Crummy Brothers. With several flavors to choose from, I decided that the only thing that really mattered was chocolate chip. Chocolate chip is the primal cookie, the cookie that all other cookies must measure up to, the cookie that you’d choose to be on a desert island with. And, more to the point, the cookie that you still eat when you get old enough that you can’t eat so many cookies anymore.

The Brothers get points for the packaging: for having the cookies individually wrapped so they will stay fresh if you don’t eat the whole box at once (see above “can’t eat so many cookies anymore”) and for the cute reading material on the sides of the box.

But. I don’t know. There aren’t any of the violations of the Sacred Chocolate Chip Cookie Rules that usually infuriate me, like having so many chocolate chips that there’s barely any cookie (if I want to eat a chocolate bar, I’ll eat a chocolate bar, thanks). It’s less obvious than that. Partly it’s that somehow, although they’re made with butter, I can’t really taste any butter. Partly, it may be the “whole grain white wheat flour” which, yes, looks white… but we all know how wrong most whole grain cookies are.

I’m just unmoved by these. If they’re going to cost so much and not even taste like butter, I’d rather have a Chips Ahoy.

• Crummy Brothers website