Originally Posted by
gsteinb
oreos are to cookies as olive garden is to italian food.
Oreos have a couple things going for them.
1. Consistency. If you keep to the US, they're always the same. I have noticed that Canadian Oreos are somewhat different.
2. They're hyper-palatable. They've been engineered so thoroughly that the mix of sweet/salt/bitter is very, very even (there isn't much sour that I can taste). In that respect, they're spooky. They've been tweaked to spin all the dials in our brain that make us want more. That enough is reason to stay away.
This is not so unlike Budweiser beer, now that I think about it.
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Side note: For a year I worked with a 'former childhood actor'. He was about 20 years old and nothing special in terms of looks or physical appearance. Girls of a certain age absolutely couldn't leave the guy alone. At some point I figured it out. He had been marketed to these women for a decade. It wasn't like someone similar to him was being sold to these girls, HE was being sold to these girls all through their formative years. The people that did the marketing are really good at it and they made him this 'hyper-palatable' guy. At first it was funny, but after a while it was just creepy.