Girl Scout cookies are helping me recover from my eating disorder. But how we talk about them might affect girls selling them.
- I'm in recovery from anorexia. I'd never let myself enjoy Girl Scout cookies as an adult before.
- This year I'm seeing the harmful diet-culture rhetoric around these cookies, and it makes me sad.
I was in the Girl Scouts from second to fifth grade. One year my mom volunteered to handle our troop's cookie distribution. We spent a weekend in what we now refer to as "cookie hell," deciphering handwritten order sheets and organizing piles of Girl Scout cookies according to what each scout had sold.
The weekend's nickname foreshadowed a different kind of food-related misery I'd experience 15 years later, when I developed anorexia in my mid-20s. A need to restrict kept me from enjoying the cookies as an adult. But a year into my recovery, I'm approaching cookie season with a new mindset.
This Girl Scout cookie season, I'm particularly attuned to diet-culture talk
My radar for diet-culture talk has been turned way up in recovery, and I've noticed my social media being flooded with "healthy" Girl Scout cookie dupes. In the past, I might have been tempted to make the innocuous-seeming recipes. Why not smear an apple slice with almond butter, organic coconut flakes, and refined-sugar-free chocolate and call it a cookie?
There's clearly demand for these recipes. But captions like "Get out of here with all that sugar, girl scouts!" and "Sugar doesn't count if it's for a good cause" indicate a moralizing of the cookies that concerns me. I feel motivated to challenge this mindset when I imagine all the comments the young saleswomen must hear during a shift at the cookie booth.
I worry about how this all may affect Girl Scouts themselves
I'm concerned that in the presence of narratives like this, girls who are supposed to be learning how to take up space as entrepreneurs, fundraisers, and whatever else they want to be might actually be learning to shrink themselves as dieters.
Sofia Stowers, my coworker's 6-year-old daughter and a Daisy Scout from Queens, New York, described the fun she has taking and counting money during cookie sales but also said she knows the cookies are "unhealthy" because "they have sugar in them."
Krista Walker of Westfield, Massachusetts, helps her 9-year-old cookie seller by taking orders, including at the gym, though she says she hears a common refrain when people buy them: "They aren't for me." She wonders why gymgoers frequently feel the need to specify that they're buying the treats for their children, spouses, or coworkers.
While the Girl Scout cookies website is virtually free of moralizing language, the cookies have developed a reputation as a guilty pleasure. In shows like "Friends and "The Office" they've been blamed for characters' weight gain. They're portrayed as irresistible.
Local news outlets sometimes suggest the cookies are here primarily to ruin people's New Year's resolutions. And in a segment describing a new cookie flavor this year, an HLN anchor said: "Just look at the nutrition information ... It's always worse than I think it's going to be, because I like to eat the whole sleeve."
I won't deny myself the foods I want to eat any longer
The implication that people should feel guilty for eating Girl Scout cookies or that people who eat them can't control themselves can end up sending the message that eating the cookies is somehow wrong or immoral. That feeds into a harmful diet culture that prizes restriction and self-denial of joy.
I've realized that if I want to demonstrate to younger girls that they can have unconditional permission to feel joy, like the kind that comes from eating their favorite cookie, I have to work on giving myself the same.
I believe that we should all be allowed to enjoy all the tastes, textures, and social benefits of foods — including cookies. Food is something to celebrate, not villainize.