Break the Rules!

Story time! (A real one, not one of Sean’s legitimately enrapturing works of fiction that somehow lays out a thought-provoking murder mystery in the context of a discounted speaker dock.)

Years ago, as something of a professional writer, I was asked to visit the local grade school for career day and talk about writing. At the time I was in corporate communications, which meant a lot of business writing for executive types at a big insurance company, and I remembered a work presentation where some of our IT guys made a peanut butter sandwich on stage by following the instructions of the crowd.

Corporate hilarity ensued as volunteers would say “put the peanut butter on the bread” and the presenter would theatrically smash the jar onto the unopened bread loaf, deliberately misinterpreting each step no matter how hard the audience members tried to be clear. It was a demonstration of how hard it can be to write technical documentation in a way that users understand.

So anyway, this felt like a great way to liven up my own presentation at the middle school. It’s a dry topic, especially since I wasn’t yet working with Meh and couldn’t dazzle them with stories of online retail and send them all home with a stroopwafel and a fistful of TrackRs.

I had no kids then, so perhaps you are predicting what happens next more than I did at the time, but let me just say that when you whip out a jar of peanut butter in front of an elementary school classroom, you might as well be pulling out a handful of anthrax.

It turns out that you can’t just brandish peanut butter in a school building. Administrators swarmed like they were the Secret Service. I was forcefully disarmed and had to go through the rest of my presentation pretending to make dry toast using the photocopier. And to this day, the email you get before you come to career day includes a bullet point made necessary by this incident.

There are rules, it turns out. And one of them is not to bring peanut butter near the kids.

Which brings us to today’s deal. These cookies are vegan, gluten-free, and free of basically every major allergen you can think of.

Which raises a fair question: how are these “Rule Breaker” cookies at all?

No gluten. No animal products. No peanuts. No tree nuts. No eggs. No dairy. No soy. No sesame. No coconut. No mustard. No fish. No shellfish. No wheat.

That’s…rules. And kind of a lot of rules, honestly.

So yeah, the branding is a little confusing because the rules kind of seem like the whole point. These very rule-following cookies avoid a lot of bad stuff, still taste delicious, and won’t get you tackled by Ms. Ellen at the front of a sixth-grade classroom if you decide to share with the kids.

Probably just eat them yourself. Ms. Ellen might hit first and ask questions later.