Confessions of a Cookie Monster

I don’t just want to be thin. Thin is passe. No, I wish to be fat-free.

I grit my teeth through fat-free creamy ranch dressing. Fat-free jalapeno-cheese bread. And when I feel like living with reckless abandon, fat-free cookies.

They exist??? you ask with disbelief. I toy with you not.

It seems only the Nabisco people, those whiz-bang bakers of fudge-covered Oreos and Nutter Butter peanut creme patties, understand how to hold the fat and pack a punch. In an awesome display of molecular manipulation, they came up in late ’92 with a to-die-for cookie: SnackWell’s Fat Free Devil’s Food Cookie Cakes. Fifty calories each. Cake-like, marshmallow-cream center. And let me add two key words: chocolate covered.

The catch: Stores can’t keep the cookies in stock. More than 45,000 callers nationwide have jammed Nabisco’s toll-free hot line in search of the cookie. Grocers have been rationed to one or two of the 12-box cases per week, depending on supplies. (Each box has 12 cookies and sells for about $2.20.)

A kind of loopy desperation has seized the masses since the cookie’s debut. Last August, the San Francisco Examiner reported that a woman forced a Nabisco driver to stop along Interstate 680 near Hayward and begged to buy boxes. Nabisco has also reported that customers in Florida, North Carolina and other states have formed buying cooperatives to hunt down the cookies and share them. And last summer, according to an Associated Press report, two shoppers came to blows over the last box in a Wilmington, Vt., store.

The company’s commercials take note of the madness and show three demanding women chasing a harried devil’s-food cookie deliveryman.

These are my people, the fanatical fat-gram counters for whom the taste of real butter is but a distant memory. They are people like me, who, in a moment of weakness, will bum a single peanut M&M; off a colleague and then pay self-imposed penance in the form of 1 1/2 hours of killer aerobics.

Before the devil’s-food cookies crawled off the production line, we, the fat-free brethren, thought that taste without guilt was madness, a Spruce Goose of a concept. But this cookie turned us into believers.

That isn’t to say I’m above duking it out for a box of cookies--if there were only one to fight for. Every week, I plaintively head for the cookie aisle in my supermarket. And almost every week, I am faced with a vast expanse of emptiness at the SnackWell’s shelf.

I complained to a store manager, throwing in bitter asides about the lost concept of capitalism. The manager explained that his hands were tied by the Nabisco powers-that-be. He said he has called and begged for more boxes.

“It’s almost like our expensive liquor that we have to keep under lock and key,” he groused.

In the past year, after fear-and-loathing expeditions to grocery stores, I’ve come up with maybe half a dozen boxes. I commiserate with out-of-town friends, shamelessly goading them into making cookie searches for me, hinting that years of friendship could be on the line.

I almost fired my cleaning woman in a fat-free-cookie frenzy. I came home one day to find a note from her on my refrigerator door: “I ate two of your cookies. I hope you don’t mind.”

Mind? I read and wept. Why didn’t she take my home computer? My car?

Nabisco spokesman Mark Gutsche assured me that the cookie makers will “have this thing licked” by the end of summer, when output is scheduled to double. Still, that means that the North Sioux City, S.D., plant will be cranking out only 2 million cookies a day. Two million cookies, for a country of 250 million people? Oh, Nabisco, do the math; you break my fat-free heart.

There are even whispers that the well-publicized cookie shortage is part of a secret Nabisco marketing scheme. Another rumor is that grocery-store employees hoard boxes for themselves and their friends and never even stock the SnackWell’s shelves. It’s nasty, this whole SnackWell’s nether world.

Nabisco dismisses the rumors and says simply that the cookies’ complicated four-hour baking process--including a birthing experience on a mile-long track--slows production. (By contrast, an Oreo is whipped out in 15 minutes.)

Oh, sure, Gutsche tried to explain the whole engineering feat, throwing out such jargon as “marshmallow bake” and “nice chocolate bath.” Nabisco even points out that the devil’s-food cookie is the only one that production-line employees are not allowed to sample and the only one not sold in the company store.

Give me cookies, Nabisco, not violins.

As for me, I’m down to my last two boxes, which I found in a grocery store near my mom’s house. I’d tell you where, but then I’d have to kill you.