Getting Old is Tough Enough...

but there's no excuse for corporate America, and just about everybody else for that matter deliberately trying to make it worse.

Take Fig Newtons for example.

Sometime last year, when no one was looking, Nabisco took the Fig out of Fig Newtons.

At first glance, the package looks close enough like regular old Fig Newtons to fool just about anyone. Especially an unsuspecting, handsome, mild mannered 77 year old man.

Mild mannered until he got home and discovered that his box of Fig Newtons......was actually a box of STRAWBERRY FIG NEWTONS...but that's not what the box of cookies disguised as Fig Newtons was called.  Nowhere was the name FIG; instead, it was called simply NEWTONS!  It was nothing but a box of tasteless impostors.

Now, originally there was no such thing as a "Newton."

A Philadelphia baker and fig lover, Charles Roser invented the Fig Newton in 1891 and named his cookies after the fruit and town of Newton, Mass.

Now, Nabisco (the current owner of the name) apparently doesn't give a fig about Mr. Roser, or his home town or millions of us chronologically gifted people who grew up eating that uniquely delicious fruit cookie.


Now in all fairness, Nabisco  still makes some Newtons with fig fillings, which would officially make them "Fig Newtons."    I discovered some the other day when I had a lot of time to search through the cookie section of my local Safeway.

However, admitting that taste is a very personal and subjective thing, in my opinion, it wasn't worth the search.
Perhaps that's the fault of our over zealous government dictating what can and can't go into cookies these days or some overpaid executive at Nabisco claiming that it needed more or less of this or that. But, as far as I'm concerned, it IS what it IS, and it AIN'T what it WAS.

Sorry to say, but I predict Nabisco's NEWTONS will soon join the graveyard of forgotten products.

Goodbye old friend, may you Rest In Peace.

-Ed


GONE, BUT NOT REMEMBERED:

etc....

-Ed