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I picked a fight with the Girls Scouts over their fat cookies


Yes, it's true, I was a Brownie a long time ago, and learned how to toast marshmellows and make rag-rugs, and I sold cookies then too.

But people weren't so - ummm - deliciously smitten with cookies and cakes and candies and pizza and hamburgers and tamales and barbacoa. We weren't so gorditas and gorditos then, ok?

San Antonio, Texas, has a reputation for great Tex-Mex food. But if you live here, it's hard to be slender. And the only slender thing about San Antonio is the river. We are one of the poorest cities in the country, deliberately so, making my community vulnerable to commercials and the flour-tortilla temptations of our working-class history. In my part of the city, there should be a law against all the fast-food joints on one block. Cheap, fast, filling food that working and middle-class people eat all the time. Have to eat, or else they'll starve.

This is why I picked a fight with the Girls Scouts selling their make-me-fat cookies outside the stores this weekend. It seems like ninety percent of the people here are overweight, many are very obese. When my out-of-town friends come to visit me, this is the first thing they notice... How dare the Girls Scouts take advantage of us this way?

But of course, they can. Everybody else does. We don't have a good mass transit system, and the middle-class won't take the buses, that's what poor people use in Texas. So hardly anyone walks. It's just too easy to gain weight in San Antonio, we have a generous table of friendship and food, it's all offered in love. Only the food we're eating right now is all wrong for us. Being gordita or gordita is normal for this city. I'm not kidding.

Our diabetes rate is skyrocketing-high, and it's like those who don't have the sugar have high blood pressure or borderline or are having heart attacks. We are a breathtakingly beautiful people, if you could only see us as I knew us when I was growing up. When we were skinny.

I told the Girls Scouts leaders at the table they needed to come up with another product - how they were killing us with every cookie they sold us. Of course the flaca Junior League-types got pissed, so much for the good-girl credo they're supposed to follow. It's about the money, honey.

No, I didn't buy the cookies. (I'm sure someone will let me have some at the office). And I hope you don't either. Ya basta! Health is a civil right, too.


credits: www.nataleedee.com

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Anonymous said…
Ok, just cuz your family is large doesn't mean you have to pick on girlscouts. That, how do you say...doesn't make mucho sense. As a consumer we have the CHOICE to purchase whatever we want, just like as a citizen we have the CHOICE to vote for whoever we want. It doesn't mean you are part of a poor, indigent population if you buy cookies and it doesn't make you a racist if you vote for Clinton. By the way, I am the thinnest person en mi familia, AND I LOVE SAMOAS y BARBACOA!
5:27 AM
pachuca said…
Wow! talk about sterotypes. GSs come in all shapes, ethnic groups with gender being the primary commonality. GS cookies are what most ignorant people think of when faced w/ a GS not about girls who are living in a migrant camp, homeless shleter or juvenile institution. GSs are there, not just in suburban neighborhoods. There are/have been troops at JT Brackenridge, McCollum HS, Roosevelt Elem, Ogden, Crockett,Truman, Adams Elem. Morrill Elem, Price, Menchaca Courts, and on and on and just who do you think are the troop leaders? not an Alamo Hts chick! its the mothers, grandmothers,sisters,aunts and yes, fathers, of these children!
GS cookie sales make it possible for ALL girls to have an opportunity to join the WORLDS LARGEST FEMALE ORGANIZATION. Yes, we are African, Russian, German, Muslim, Chinese, Filipino, and on and on. Our program materials are in so many languages your ignorant little Ivy League head will spin.One of the GS World Centers is in Mexico!So if you don't want to buy GS cookies, don't, but as a journalist you should have done a little more research.
1:55 PM
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