Every Tuesday, I have lunch with my Department Chair at our local and we share an oatmeal raising cookie.

He is going to teach in New Zealand for the summer term (winter term there), so I spent some time going around time checking out possible cookie sources. I can't keep them in the house because I am an addict – one is too many and a thousand aren't enough.

So, I eat my sweets in public, where the portions are controlled and I'd be too embarrassed to ask for me.

I tried every bakery and shop that sells sweets looking for a reasonably sized cookie and had no luck.

Every place I looked, the sweets were on mega-doses of steroids. Literally. One place has, as their normal size, a cookie that has an 8-inch diameter.

Please!

Can you imagine the sugar, fats, and starch in something that size? There goes my calories for the day.

What to do?

I stopped by the local and spoke to the owner (one of the neat things about living in a small town). We've agreed that he'll give me half the cookie when I come in and freeze the other half until the following week.

Not an ideal situation, but I really don't want to get too accustomed to eating the entire cookie.

My question is this: If we know this type of food is bad for us, who's buying it? When did it become okay to serve people their daily ration of calories as an after-meal treat?