The one percent

On a cookie

By Culinate staff

November 7, 2012

On her blog, Culinate contributor Giovanna Zivny recently wrote about a cookie-and-politics experiment. In the spirit of the season, she decided to bake a batch of chocolate-chip cookies, with the chips divided to match the nation’s current unequal distribution of wealth. This produced many cookies with just two chips, a few with more, and one poor cookie overloaded with 228 chips — the One Percent Cookie.

“In the end, I noticed that the cookies with more chips spread more than the ones with two chips. As if wealth begets wealth,” Zivny mused. “I understand that cookies aren’t the same as people. And I don’t expect every single cookie to have the exact same number of chips as the next cookie. But it seems a batch of cookies that tries to approach a more fair distribution is a better cookie. A more civilized cookie.”