Cookie Dash Begins

Chalk it up to a quirk of candy-coated karma.

The local Girl Scouts and Camp Fire organizations launched their annual munchie drives on the same day at the same time and practically at the same place.

Yet nobody planned these simultaneous sendoffs.

A herd of chirping Girl Scouts gathered Saturday inside U-City Mall in the Spokane Valley. Meanwhile, across the street, Camp Fire kiddies were revving up their own selling engines in the United Methodist Church.

This was Lee and Grant perched on opposite sides of Gettysburg. This was the Denver Broncos and the Atlanta Falcons squaring off.

Except, of course, the Falcons would have dropped the cookies.

“What do Camp Fire kids eat?” Connie Dirk asks 9-year-old son, Zach, in a corner of the church gym.

“Brownnnneeees!” shouts the dark-haired cutie pie, who sold 355 packages of Camp Fire treats last year.

For those unfamiliar with the nomenclature, Brownies are among the smallest of the Girl Scouts. But they have a big place in Cookiedom.

“Older girls know that if they take a cute Brownie with them, they’ll sell a lot more cookies,” says Lindy Cater, the executive director of the Girl Scouts Inland Empire Council.

Cater and her Camp Fire counterpart, Vi Martin, are quick to downplay any suggestion of rivalry between their two stellar institutions.

But let’s be real. Beloved as they are, the Camp Fire and Girl Scouts both pan from the same public gold stream.

Last year, the Girl Scouts of the Inland Empire peddled 225,000 boxes of Thin Mints, Samoas and Do-Si-Dos, to name a few. The somewhat smaller Camp Fire contingent hawked 120,000 packages of Mint Creams, Trail Mix and Almond Covered Clusters.

Money is used to pay camp fees and to promote goodness and light.

But just think. If these young entrepreneurs wised up and turned to, say, Amway, they’d be going to school in chauffeur-driven Lincolns.

Take 8-year-old Terrah Taylor, for example. The third-grader at Logan Elementary sold 805 packages of Camp Fire yummies last year. Her new goal is 1,000 packages.

The secret, she told me, is to look potential customers in the eye, smile and say in a sweet voice: “Was that one or two packages?”

Girl Scout Karolyn Graham, 10, has a different yet equally effective tactic. She hauls her three brothers with her to a store. As the boys politely open doors for customers, she asks if they’d like to help a Girl Scout go to camp.

“Guilt is good,” observes director Cater, who sold her weight in cookies as a Girl Scout.

My wife, Sherry, says when she was a Camp Fire girl she had a better sales scheme that involved much less work.

She would simply leave all her mints in an easily accessible spot at home. Before long, family members would begin gobbling like hogs at a trough.

A few days later, her mother would get out the checkbook.

For the purposes of honest reporting, I personally taste-tested every cookie and gooey treat at both rallies.

After recovering from a sugar-induced coma, I hurried back to the newspaper to compile my findings.

For my money, nothing beats a Camp Fire Almond Covered Cluster ($4 per package). Or, for that matter, six dozen Almond Covered Clusters.

That’s the way the Girl Scout cookie crumbles.

This is not to say, however, that Scout cookies ($3.50 a box) are in any way rancid. Hardly. They are so good you can almost feel your love handles turning into armrests with each bite.

The coconut, caramel and chocolate Samoas are the most artery-clogging at 80 calories each. But the oatmeal, peanut butter Do-Si-Dos kick major booty as far as I’m concerned.

A final thought on the Girl Scouts’ new “reduced fat” Apple Cinnamon cookie: Yech!

Please. If you want to eat healthy, go chomp a stinking carrot stick. Fat is where cookies are at.

Much like TV journalism, a reduced fat cookie is just another counterfeit contradiction in terms.