What I’m Thinking About This Week

With all of the current discussion in the media about the Covid-19 disease and promising vaccines for it, I remembered when my parents were concerned about our family getting polio and the debilitating paralysis (and even death) that could ensue if we did get it.  As I recall, it was the late 1950s or early 1960s when the anxiety peaked high enough that our city or county decided to offer sugar cubes containing the vaccine.

I remember lining up with many, many people in front of us on a Saturday afternoon.  My elementary school, which was roughly a block away from where we lived, was one of the vaccine sites.  The waiting line was so long that we were waiting in front of our own house.  To receive the pink sugar cube quickly, we were asked to cup our hands and then after ingesting it, that was it.  We may have had to return a few weeks later for another sugar cube – that part I can’t remember.

So this past week when I was talking to a friend, I mentioned the sugar cube vaccine for polio.  She didn’t recall that at all, which I thought was odd since she is about my age.  When I researched it, though, I found out that there were two vaccines. One was given by injection and the other was given orally.  Dr. Jonas Salk’s vaccine was the one given by injection and Dr. Albert Sabin’s vaccine was the oral one.  Both vaccines were highly effective.  By 1979, the U.S. was nearly polio-free, thanks to the vaccines.  You can read more about that here.

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And now to the latest buzz on social media…the new gluten-free Oreo cookie made by Nabisco.  Tom and I went to Ralph’s this morning to see whether they had any in stock.  Since we have some gluten-sensitive family members, we thought we would give them a try.  Would they taste like a delicious Oreo cookie or more like chopped-up cardboard?

The shelf was full of many Oreo cookies, but not the gluten-free ones.  Tom asked a clerk, who was nice enough to retrieve a package from the back.  Meanwhile, I was at the cash register, mentioning the gluten-free Oreos.  I was told that they had sold many packages the day before.  We felt lucky that we could buy even one package.

You might be interested in the ingredients.  I know they are hard to read on the back of the package below: sugar, palm oil, white rice flour, tapioca starch, canola oil, whole oat flour, plus others.  They do contain soy.

And now to our taste test….

I have to say that I taste absolutely no difference between the regular  Oreos and these.  The gluten-free ones look almost exactly the same except that “Gluten” is stamped across the top and “Free” is stamped across the bottom.

Hats off to Nabisco for helping out a significant portion of the population who needs an alternative to a regular gluten-filled cookie!