What is an Ancestral Snack? It is a snack food of my youth, one that I am still physically capable of eating today.

For example, the Keebler Fudge Stripe cookie, currently being sold as part of the Fudge Shoppe line. Now, my brain wants to tell me that wasn't always the case - that they were originally released, along with Deluxe Grahams and some other thing I couldn't stand because it had mint or nuts or both in it, as part of the E.L. Fudge line.

Get it? Everybody Loves Fudge, or E.L.F.? Keebler? Elves? Anyway, the Internet refuses to divulge the secret history of the Fudge Stripe cookie, and insists that E.L. Fudge is an elf-shaped sandwich cookie. My memory is neither confirmed nor denied, and is thus assumed to be true.

Doesn't matter anyway. The point is, sometime in the 80's the Keebler factory developed advanced chocolate enrobing technology, probably straight from Area 51. This technology could not only coat a graham cracker completely in a chocolate-esque substance, creating the fairly sublime Deluxe Graham, but it could also lay a full layer of faux fudge along the bottom of a shortbread donut, and four lines of the stuff along the top, creating the almighty Fudge Stripe.

How do they taste? Well, I'll be the first to admit that nostalgia renders the question ALMOST completely irrelevant, but they taste OK. The shortbread is mediocre shortbread. It's no Lorna Doone, but neither will it explode into a small cloud of shortbread dust when you bite into it, the way a Lorna Doone will. The fudge hints at chocolateyness. The worst sounding ingredient? "Sorbitan Monostearate", who I'm pretty sure ruled Greece for over two decades.

The key to my childhood love of Fudge Stripes was, of course, the geometry. A Fudge Stripe cookie is a torus intersected by four parallel lives, dividing the cookie into somewhere between five and nine sections, depending on how many of the stripes you counted as their own sections. This provided a near-infinite number of ways to eat it - end to end by sections, outside to middle by sections, eating as much of the cookie as possible while retaining the integrity of the center hole... what do you want? This was the early days of cable. The Nintendo DS was decades away. We made our own fun. Deluxe Grahams actually taste better, but the only game you can play with them is trying to get all the fudge off them leaving the intact graham center, and that's kind of gross to be doing at age 40.

Why do I still eat them? Well, as I mentioned, they're not entirely awful, even if Michael Pollan wouldn't call them food. You get a lot in a package, and also, I don't really crave packaged cookies very often, and when I do, there's a limited assortment that I like. So through pure law of averages, a couple of times a year I end up with a pack of Fudge Stripes in my hand.