I am a Consumer Whore #3

I have developed a habit of taking ZonePerfect bars with me to work and occasionally snacking on them around the house. I'm not convinced that they really count as food, but they taste good enough to be eaten regularly, they have a long shelf life, and they don't make me feel as sick as vending machine candy. They're also probably a more nutritious snack than the salt & vinegar potato chips of which I just compulsively ate a handful while trying to finish this paragraph.

Around Christmas (note: I've been meaning to post this for about two and a half months now), I discovered that my latest box of substitute food contained a coupon for a dollar off "New" Cookie Dough ZonePerfect bars. I have long held the opinion that nutrition bars are always going to taste funny and that any attempt to change that will either fail or result in something that is no longer nutritious. Therefore, the idea of combining a nutrition bar with cookie dough seemed preposterous to me.

I am intrigued by the preposterous.

After a couple weeks of meaning to take the coupon with me to the store, making notes to myself that I should take the coupon with me to the store, and putting the coupon on top of my shopping list so that I could not possibly forget to take it to the store, I finally took a trip to the store in which the coupon was not left at home. I loaded my shopping cart with various consumables and picked up a box of the chocolate chip bars, on the assumption that they'd be the variety least likely to taste oppressively foul. I then headed over to the self-checkout lanes.

I almost always use the self-checkout lanes at grocery stores. Since those lanes became commonplace, grocers have greatly cut back on their staff, and as a result, the few remaining fully-staffed lanes usually have lines two or three customers long. Furthermore, the people waiting in those lines tend to be in them because they're buying $200 in groceries and don't feel like scanning all of it themselves, so I find it's usually faster to go through the self-checkout lanes than to wait for an actual person to ring things up. Most importantly for me, though, using the self-checkout lanes almost always allows me to get through shopping trips without having to talk to anybody.

I was rather unhappy, therefore, when the sale terminal did not immediately accept the coupon and allow me to continue checking out in isolation. It was a general-purpose manufacturer's coupon and in no way associated with the store. If had planned for it to happen, I probably wouldn't have thought much of it, but because the coupon's rejection was unexpected, the realization that I would be introducing myself to the cashier as someone who buys imitation cookie dough was rather alarming. However, I had no choice but to present the coupon if I wanted the terminal to let me complete the sale, so I walked over to the cashier's station and did my best to justify my ridiculous purchase.

"Hi, I got this manufacturer's coupon a while ago and decided that I had to at least try it—"

"What?"

I cut short my babbling and handed her the coupon. She jerked her head back in a way that could only indicate that she neither understood nor liked what she was seeing.

"It's not one of ours."

"No, it came from the manufacturer. I..."

She continued to stare at the coupon as I gave up on trying to absolve myself.

"'A bar that tastes like cookie dough but acts like a nutrition bar.' Huh." I could hear the judgement dripping from her voice. Her larynx had become a judgement atomizer. After a few seconds of alternately staring and squinting, though, her expression changed and she appeared satisfied that the coupon was indeed a coupon. She folded it in half and returned it to me. "You just put this in the machine, okay?"

I mumbled a half-sentence in which I may have thanked her and finished checking out as quickly as I could. On my way out of the store, I passed her station again.

"Have a nice night," she said, trying to smile but succeeding only in smirking. Judgement.

When I returned home from my traumatic battle with nothing, I decided that the whole thing was at least as stupid as buying Taco Bell and got out my camera.

Because I actually do eat Zone bars regularly, I wanted to give the cookie dough variant at least the same chance at looking like food that I gave the Taco Bell Boxstrosity and the queso debacle. However...

...cookie dough does not belong on a plate, even in bar form. I had an idea and said to myself, "Maybe if I..."

"...no." As for how it tasted, well...

A few years ago, I decided to make vegan cookies despite not knowing anything about vegan baking. I prepared chocolate chip cookie dough according to the standard recipe, but I omitted the eggs and replaced the butter with vegetable shortening (the chocolate chips themselves may still have contained some milk products, but I felt that the cookies were still close enough to being vegan to count as a first attempt). The result of this experiment was a batch of two dozen cookies that looked like ordinary chocolate chip cookies — perhaps a bit thinner than usual, but still within reason — but didn't taste like anything. They were maddening cookie impostors. Even after having eaten a couple of them and knowing what I should expect, I would see the remaining cookies and instinctively say to myself, "I enjoy chocolate chip cookies and shall now partake of them," and then feel incredibly disappointed when I bit into one.

The cookie dough ZonePerfect bar was like one of my vegan (-ish) cookies, except that in place of nothing, it had the characteristic nutrition bar taste. It was a nutrition bar with a chewier-than-usual texture that left traces of an oily residue on my fingers. It was neither good enough to be a pleasant surprise, nor bad enough to make feel like I'd learned something. It was disappointing.

I now have a deep mistrust of coupons.