Excavating a late-twentieth-century layer thirty feet beneath a municipal landfill, researchers from Princeton University unearthed a pristine 1994 SnackWell’s Devil’s Food Cookie Cake on Thursday, its glaze unbothered by three decades of rain, pressure and microbial life.
“Not a single bacterium would touch it,” said lead stratigrapher Dr. Helen Mercer, lifting the specimen with steel tongs. “In 1994 we called this health food because it had no fat.”
Surrounding the cookie, the team catalogued a dense stratum of diaries, each opened to an entry from roughly ninety minutes after a box was finished.
“Same handwriting pattern across all of them,” Mercer said. “Blood sugar crashes, hunger returns, the woman apologizes to the diary for having no willpower. Nobody wrote down the sugar.”
The team has requested funding to excavate the adjacent 2003 layer, believed to contain a complete set of low-carb bread.
At press time the cookie had been placed in a sealed case and was still, according to instruments, faintly judging the room.
