Snack Review: World of Grains Cookies

I am deeply suspicious of snacks that make health claims. Healthy eating doesn’t mean giving up pleasure in food. That won’t make you live forever – it’ll just feel that way. As long as you get all your fruits and vegetables and so on at meals, there is nothing wrong with a snack that’s just junk once in a while.

What’s more, I’ve lived through enough bogus food trends – oat bran, low fat snacks that ended up having twice as much sugar, people eating nothing but bacon and meat and thinking it is a health diet – to have learned that any health claim is going to be used as a way to make money by companies whose only interest in your health is whether you have the strength left to take your wallet out of your pocket.

So when I was asked if I wanted some samples of these to review, I was all, “Bring them on! You can’t fool all of the people all of the time! I wasn’t born yesterday! Etc.!”

When the cookies arrived, the ingredient list increased my skepticism and dread. The first is a ‘grain blend’ containing at least of couple of ingredients that I feel are only suitable for feeding to birds (flax and millet) and others that, while a human food, do not belong in cookies (rye and buckwheat) in my opinion.

The rather frighteningly healthy choice of flavors was off-putting also: apple cinnamon surely only counts as a ‘flavor’ for timid babies, and it’s clear that the only reason blueberry is one of the choices is that it’s supposed to be a miracle antioxidant food, not because someone’s remembering their grandmother’s blueberry pie.

So, spoiling for a fight, I stared with oatmeal raisin, since at least that’s really a cookie flavor. And here’s where the plot started to go awry. The bottoms of these were overcooked, with a burnt raisin flavor that I could do without. But they were otherwise surprisingly decent.

I had had a large dinner, so mere hunger was not the reason. For verification purposes, I gave one to my technical staff. He is not very picky, but also not a huge cookie eater. He ate it and asked for a second one.

I decided next to go all the way to the other end of the scale: a flavor called “multigrain.” I think we can all agree that “multigrain” is seriously NOT a cookie flavor. So imagine my surprise that these were quite decent also. They are somewhat like a graham cracker (the only normal cookie that contains whole grain) or an English digestive biscuit. They have a rich grainy flavor rather than that horrible, undercooked, porridgey flavor that whole wheat cookies often have.

The multigrain flavor also didn’t have the burnt bottoms of the oatmeal raisin ones, which was a plus. I even ate a third – of the multigrain flavor - and began to wonder if they contained mind-altering drugs. This was not at all what I had expected. I then tried the blueberry, and the fruit flavor brought to mind a morning bowl of cereal, suggesting that another way you could describe the flavor is something like a good granola or granola bar, but with a cookie texture.

I suspect that the secret that the big food companies have finally discovered is that if you want to up the fiber content of a traditionally white-flour food, you should not confine yourself to whole wheat. I have lately been eating two brands of whole grain high fiber pastas which, I swear, would not make my grandmother spin in her grave, which I found nearly as surprising as these cookies. The pastas are similarly made from blends of different ingredients, and are many times better than whole wheat pasta, which is basically nasty even in its best versions.

I do wonder what kind of fantastical factory processing the grains involved in these newfangled products may be undergoing. But they taste better than whole wheat, and I’m tired of listening to my doctor tell me to eat less white carbs (which seems to be the only nutrition advice she knows), so I’m just keeping an open mind. As far as the cookies go, the rest of the ingredients do include such entirely recognizable substances as butter – imagine that – which I have to give them credit for.

If you are really obsessed with the nutrition facts, note that the big “15g whole grain per serving” on the front of the package translates to 3g of actual dietary fiber on the back nutrition facts label, which is the figure you’d normally be counting and comparing. Which is probably just as well because 15g of fiber in 30g of cookies would basically amount to eating wood shavings, and I don’t care what my doctor says, I would not eat that.

So, you are not going to confuse these with Oreos, and I would not serve them for dessert to company, but they are quite surprisingly OK. Should you really be getting your whole grains from cookies instead of from dinner? That’s for you to decide, but if that’s important to you, I’d definitely give these a try.

• World of Grains Website

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