I lost about 40 pounds on a keto diet, that being the near-total abnegation of carbs. It worked, for me, but the strict mandate means my foodlife is mostly salads, nuts and meat. Tough going! The popularity of the diet, and others similar to it (paleo, Atkins, etc), has created a market for carbless snacks that nonetheless resemble carbtastic snacks. Such as "keto cookies," a new product from ketokookies.com that they're kickstarting.

I've written about ditching carbs in the past, and they sent some over in hopes of coverage. I'm ambivalent about the idea of this. I feel that avoiding snacks like cookies and chips and whatnot is a key part of getting out of the metabolic marketing shitfeast of modern eating. So the idea of "keto cookies" seems to me a doomed compromise with the thing that got me to 200 pounds in the first place.

On the other hand, they're cookies with 1.4g net carbs. So I am going to eat them. What do they taste like?

They're pretty good. They pass. They taste like legit chocolate chip cookies, with the following caveats: they have an unusually dusty, crumbly mouthfeel, and they have that distinctive sharp sugar-alcohol aftertaste. The're the Coke Zero of cookies.

If your carb-denial strategy needs a dessert that tastes of home, these will do nicely. I'm still undecided if that's something I need—but I did enjoy these simulacra.

It's the kind of thing that reminds you that eating is cultural, and that culture is habit. And that it can all be overthought. Are cookies OK? Is cookies bad? The piss strips say I'm still in keto after scarfing a few, so it seems this all comes down to philosophy.