On Cookies As A Breakfast Food

Hello Gentle Readers!

As I assume most of you reading this post will be rather unfamiliar with me or my work, a small introduction is in order.

I am a wanderer and traveller of the backwaters and byways of mine own mind. Sojourning through this wondrous panoply of song called life, I have thoughts and encounter snares upon my way. Forging through the dense brush I stop and marvel at both the great and the small. Uncovering the table to see what waits to be reengaged.

In short I am life unfolding with no aim or end in sight.

When I was a kid, I had a very simple, very reasonable position: I should be allowed to eat cookies for breakfast.

Not just any cookies. Not the abstract, negotiable idea of "cookies" as a category. I meant something very specific—Archway molasses cookies. Soft, dark, spiced in a way that felt heavier than dessert, like they had a kind of gravity to them. And I didn't want them drowned in milk, either. I wanted them as-is, maybe with a glass of orange juice or Sunny Delight on the side. That was the breakfast. That was the point.

But every morning, I'd get the same response: that's not breakfast food.

Which never made sense to me, because right there on the table would be Honeycomb, or something equally sweet, equally processed, equally… dessert-adjacent. And yet that counted. That passed the test. That was acceptable.

So I argued. Not like a kid trying to get away with something, but like someone pointing out an obvious contradiction. If this—this bowl of sugar-coated shapes—counts as breakfast, then why not cookies? What's the actual difference?

The answer I eventually got wasn't really an answer. It was a substitution.

At some point, I was introduced to Cookie Crisp. And the logic, unspoken but clear, was: See? Here. This solves your problem. Cookies for breakfast.

But it didn't solve anything.

Because Cookie Crisp isn't a cookie. It's a cereal that looks like what someone thinks a cookie is, reduced down into something small, uniform, and milk-compatible. It's the idea of a cookie, flattened into a format that fits the rules. And once it fits the rules, it becomes acceptable.

But that wasn't what I was asking for.

I didn't want the category to be approved. I didn't want a version of cookies that had been translated into something else. I wanted the exact thing I had in mind—the texture, the taste, the way it stood on its own without needing to be submerged in milk to justify itself.

Cookie Crisp was presented as the answer to my question, but it wasn't even answering the same question.

And that's something I didn't have the language for back then, but I could feel it clearly: there's a difference between getting what you asked for and being given something that technically resolves the problem from someone else's perspective.

My mom accepted the solution. And to be fair, it made sense within the system she was operating in. Breakfast had rules. Cookie Crisp fit those rules. Therefore, cookies for breakfast had been addressed.

But I didn't accept it. Because the rules themselves weren't the point. The point was the thing.

Looking back, that moment feels bigger than it should. Not because of the cookies, but because it's such a clean example of something that happens everywhere: you ask for something specific, something rooted in your own experience, and the response you get is a generalized, system-approved version of that thing.

And then you're told it's the same.

"This is what you wanted."

No, it isn't.

It's what fits.

There's a subtle shift that happens there. Your original idea—the one that came from you, that had a particular shape and texture to it—gets translated into something legible to a broader system. And in that translation, it loses the very qualities that made it meaningful in the first place.

But because the system can now recognize it, it becomes easier to distribute, easier to justify, easier to accept.

And if you push back, it can look like you're being unreasonable. After all, you got your cookies for breakfast. What's the issue?

The issue is that they're not cookies.

Not really.

They're a compromise that presents itself as fulfillment.

And once you start noticing that pattern, you see it everywhere—solutions that answer a question adjacent to the one you asked, replacements that carry the label but not the substance, approvals that depend on reshaping the original idea until it's no longer disruptive.

As a kid, all I knew was that Cookie Crisp wasn't what I wanted. I didn't have a theory of systems or abstraction or institutional logic. I just knew the difference between the thing itself and something pretending to be it.

And I still think that difference matters.

Because sometimes the most honest response isn't to accept the offered solution, even if it technically "works."

Sometimes the honest response is the one I had back then:

I don't want that.

I want the cookie.