Girl Scout Cookies fascinate me. They are a bit of a cultural phenomenon. Once a year we all get very excited and spend too much $$ on boxes of cookies that cute little girls in uniforms dole out. Or their parents give you the list and ask you purchase some. Either way.

First a little background and trivia. There are two primary companies that develop and bake Girl Scout Cookies: Little Brownie Bakers and ABC/Interbake. Each Girl Scout Council chooses their baker independently which explains why even regionally you may see different cookies sold by different troops. For example, last year in San Francisco I purchased cookies from my boss’s daughter and my cousin. My boss lived in the East Bay and my cousin in the South Bay – each was selling from different companies. I could only get Samoas from the East Bay!

Little Brownie Bakers appear to be the original company and make:

• Thin Mints
• Trefoils
• Samoas®
• Do-Si-Dos
• Tagalongs®
• All Abouts
• Little Browniesâ„¢
• Café Cookies

Notice those are all the original cookie name we grew up!

ABC/Interbake bakes approximately 40% of the Girl Scout Cookies each year. They make similar cookies but with the new names:

• Caramel deLites
• Peanut Butter Patties
• Shortbread
• Thin Mints
• Peanut Butter Sandwich
• Cartwheels
• Thanks-A-Lot
• Lemonade

Here are the ugly facts:

1. PARTIALLY HYDROGENATED OIL is in every cookie. No exceptions. However the ABC company does typically use it in the form of vegetable shortening not just oil.
2. HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP is in

• Peanut Butter Patties (ABC)
• Caramel deLites (ABC)
• Thin Mints (ABC)
• Thanks-A-Lot (ABC)
• Peanut Butter Sandwich (ABC) – corn syrup only
• Lemonades (ABC) – corn syrup only

In summary – not that you will have much choice as to what vendor the council in your area chooses, but if possible it is better to have cookies from the Little Brownie Bakers based on the fact that they only use SUGAR and not any HFCS. Plus I like the original names the best anyway.

This has been posted in the HFCS area of the site, but I felt it warranted a FOTD post to highlight the places you are likely to find HFCS. 

Recently I cleaned out and organized our pantry & fridge. I wanted to do a search for items with HFCS and items that did not have it which surprised me. The results? See for yourselves:

Cereal, rice wine vinegar, Chinese seasonings, Girl Scout Cookies, marshmallows, and some kind of noodle thing my husband got at Safeway. All of that went into the trash (except my husband’s noodles of course!)

And the surprises? See for yourselves, look at all this chocolate made with real sugar – NO HFCS in these products!

And crackers with no HFCS!

Trader Joe’s seems to primarily stock products that do NOT contain HFCS. I have not yet found a product containing any there (but haven’t done an exhaustive search either!).

Those are a few discoveries from my kitchen. What’s in your pantry?

Under the Farm Bill, the great bulk of USDA largesse flows to five crops: corn, soy, cotton, wheat, and rice. Of the $113.6 billion in commodity subsidy payments doled out by the USDA between 1995 and 2004, corn drew $41.8 billion — more than cotton, soy, and rice combined.

Funneling so much money into corn encourages overproduction which in turn lowers the price of corn on the market. Large companies have therefore been able to produce high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) at very low prices.

High fructose corn syrup now accounts for nearly half of the caloric sweeteners added to processed food, and is the sole caloric sweetener for mass-market soft drinks.

Yikes.

Source: Grist Blog: I’m Hatin’ It