Recession Dinner

Scraping the bottom of the barrel: garlic cottage cheese on toasted Brownberry Health Nut bread, half a sweet potato, and a spinach and apple salad with seriously good bleu cheese dressing and a sproonkle of cheese. Yes, "sproonkle."

Monkeylicious? Say It Ain't So!

I love coconut cake as much as anyone, and you don't ever want to stand between me and a box of Chessmen cookies, but I don't know if I can stay on board the Pepperidge Farm love train in light of this purported "flavor feature" that I noticed on the company's website.

"Harvest helpers: In Thailand, specially-trained macaque monkeys pick coconuts from trees."

Is this a charming anecdote, or are the purveyors of my beloved Mint Milanos admitting to profiting from forced monkey labor? And if this is their acknowledgment of putting our simian cousins (for whom I have, admittedly, a well-documented fondness) to work in their deliciousness factories, can they assure us that coconut picking is the extent of what's expected of our little not-quite-uprightly-bipedal friends? Don't make me imagine little cotton-topped tamarins sweating over ovens and sprinkling coconut shavings on cakes under the stern gaze of cruel, whip-cracking human masters -- I mean managers.

Seriously, Pepperidge Farm. What's going on here? If I flip over the coconut cake box and the nutritional information includes a little asterisk that says something like "product may contain mixed monkey parts," my love for you is dead.