Cookie monsters

When it comes to cookies, there is generally no resemblance between homemade and commercially packaged. With the exception of a couple of truly terrible cookies my grandmother made - a vile-tasting currant cookie, and this tasteless white thang with sprinkles on it that was so hard it could have broken every sweet tooth in your mouth - homemade cookies (including others that Grandma made, by the way) are, in my experience, far superior to anything you can get in the grocery store.

Not that packaged cookies are all bad. I like a Bischoff with my tea. Pepperidge Farms makes plenty of very tasty cookies. I'm not above throwing a family-size package of Oreos in my cart. (Yo ho ho for an Oreo.) And at some point in the next day or so, since the girls aren't out on the street corners this year, I'll be placing an online order for Girl Scout Cookies from my local troop. 

But mostly, if I have a choice, I'll opt for homemade.

Most of the homemade cookies I love don't actually have a store-bought equivalent. Nutmeg Logs. Frosty Fruit Bars. Peanut Butter Kiss. I could go on with a litany of family faves, largely Christmas cookies, but with a few all seasonal treats thrown in there, too. 

One cookie that tries to compete with homemade, and generally fails miserably, is the classic Toll House Cookie. 

Chips Ahoy bear no resemblance to what you get by following the recipe on the back of a bright yellow package of Nestle's Semi-Sweet Morsels. Nabisco did used to have a really nice coconut chocolate chip cookie, but that's long gone. Should have jettisoned Chips Ahoy and kept the coconut version.

I will confess that, in my youth, I was rather fond of Peggy Lawton Choco-Chips, even though they tasted more like chalk than like a real cookie. 

No, most commercial chocolate chip cookies are epic fails.

Other than Tate's.

Tate's aren't 100% homemade equivalent. They may not even be six 9's. But they're pretty damned good. And to prove it, there's usually a bag in my cupboards for those odd moments here and there when I need a cookie fix, and I've finished up the Christmas cookies that I had stowed in my freezer. 

Tate's is a great story. They began life simply, when fifty years ago, a young girl on Long Island started baking and selling cookies at her family's farm stand. Tate's took off and as can happen, a few years back, Tate's Bake Shop was acquired. By Mondelez. For $500M. 

Surprisingly, they've seemed to maintain the Tate quality, and still taste almost like the real thing. 

Alas, the unopened bag in my cupboard may have to last a lifetime. That is if the reports coming out of Long Island turn out to be true. 

Union officials say workers at Tate's Bake Shop are being threatened with deportation if they try to unionize...But employees disclosed the allegations to News 12 with their identities shielded for fear of retaliation.

Those who spoke to News 12 spoke through a Spanish interpreter. They alleged that some employees at Tate's, a majority of whom are undocumented immigrants, say they're being harassed at work.

...Employees say they're scared they'll lose their jobs or even be deported, because they claim management has threatened to call Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Eastern States Joint Board President Cosmo Lubrano says once supervisors at Tate's heard about the employees wanting to unionize, they began harassing them, which is illegal under the National Labor Relations Act.

"They began threatening people based on their immigration status, telling them that if their documents are not in order and they attempted to join the labor union they would get deported," says Lubrano. (Source: Long Island News)

Cookie monsters!

Mondelez denies that this is true. Au contraire, they say, "Tate's prides itself on treating all its employees with respect, and we have fostered over many years an inclusive, supportive, caring work environment and culture with our employees."

I suspect that the harassment and threats to call ICE aren't Mondelez corporate policy. But I suspect they don't care all that much if local management plays a little hardball when employees are starting to seem a bit restive to them. And what could be easier, when you're hiring undocumented workers, to pay them poorly and threaten them with deportation?

The vote to unionize will be completed by late April. It will be interesting to see what happens here. Very difficult, I'm quite sure, to vote YES! when such intense pressure is on. 

Tate's are already pretty pricey, but I wouldn't mind paying a bit more if it meant a bit more in the paycheck for the workers, and their being treated with a bit more dignity and a lot fewer threats.

We'll see. But I'm thinking that that bag in there might be my last. Good thing I know how to bake cookies from scratch!