Leibniz Biscuits: The "Best of All Possible" Biscuits?
At Jack’s today: Leibniz Cocoa Biscuits, by the German company Bahlsen. They’re all-natural, fair-trade (“UTZ-certified”), and bilingual: the packaging features text in both English and French (“Biscuits Au Cacao”).
My interest in these is…a bit roundabout.
For close to a quarter century, I’ve been seeing followers of Lyndon LaRouche (economist, philosopher, eight-time presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche) around the city. They seem to disappear arbitrarily for years at a time, but when they re-emerge, they always look the same, with their folding card-tables and cheap-looking literature. Mostly, they seem to hang out near City Hall, but I’ve also spotted them on the Upper West Side and outside Grand Central – and once, on the Ride to Montauk bike tour, I noticed them in Eastern Queens.
RationalWiki (which claims to be dedicated to “Analyzing and refuting pseudoscience” and “Documenting the full range of crank ideas”) espouses what seems to be a fairly common view of LaRouche, describing him as:
a perpetual office seeker with a messiah complex, who operates his own batshit loony (but thankfully ineffective) political machine in a manner freakishly reminiscent of a religious cult. Many of his political workers are young adults who think LaRouche, and only LaRouche, knows what needs to be done to Save The World.
Two years ago, they showed up across from Greeley Square, on a day when I happened to be feeling chatty. I tried to get them to explain some of their core beliefs, but made the mistake of leading off with a mild objection to their imagery – namely, a poster of President Obama with a Hitler moustache.
They insisted that, since Obama is indeed a “fascist” and a “dictator,” it was an apt comparison.
Well, I’m not that politically-engaged a person, but I don’t think Obama is a fascist or a dictator. I politely explained to them why I didn’t feel they were doing themselves any favors taking that approach – which promptly earned me a place on their shit list.
I remained curious, though.
At the time, LaRouche’s own website (which has since gone from a “.org” to a “.com” – I’m not sure why) claimed that “Lyndon LaRouche and LaRouchePAC are what stand between you and an otherwise inevitable collapse of civilization.”
In his more measured Wikipedia entry, I learned that LaRouche is a follower of one Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz – a name I’d never heard.
I’m not enough of a student of philosophy to begin to unravel the intellectual connections between LaRouche and Leibniz, but once I’d ran across his name, my curiosity (fickle as it is) turned to the latter man, who is, it turns out, a fairly towering figure in the field of mathematics, philosophy and physics. Some examples:
He is believed to have developed Calculus independently of Isaac Newton.
He helped formulate something called the “law of continuity,” which suggests that “whatever succeeds for the finite, also succeeds for the infinite” – a theory that didn’t find wide mathematical implementation until the 20th century.
He helped refine the binary number system.
He believed that ours is the “best of all possible” worlds that God could have created – an idea mocked by Voltaire in Candide.
I assumed my ignorance regarding Leibniz could be blamed on my own spotty education, but of the half dozen or so people I asked, only one was able to identify him in anything but the vaguest terms (“a mathematician?” was as close as any of the others got). And a quick search of the fan-maintained Jeopardy! archive reveals only about a dozen clues about Leibniz over the show’s thirty-year history – in none of which does he appear as the answer (er, the question), only within the clue itself.
Maybe not a household name, then.
But – back to the biscuits! Check out the label, and you’ll find that it is indeed the same fellow. Under “The Leibniz Story” (or “La petite histoire de Leibniz”):
In 1891, Hermann Bahlsen, the company’s founder, created these biscuits and named them after Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the most famous citizen of his hometown of Hannover. Leibniz, born in 1646, was a philosopher, mathematician, and physicist. Leibniz is one of the oldest trade names in business today.
One of the oldest trade names in business? Could it even be, then, that the biscuits have overtaken their namesake in worldwide public awareness?
Probably not, right? But this much I can say: they are delicious. I tried them at work this morning, and was not at all disappointed. They are exactly as light as you’d want them to be – such that even a split-second dip into hot tea (Lindsay Gardens chamomile tea, to be precise – available at Jack’s!) perfectly primes them to all but melt in your mouth.
I could have eaten the whole package, to be honest, but there was no risk of that: Stargazer95 and her six-year-old daughter – who’s on winter break, and who asked to be identified as “Sheriff Callie” – showed up just as I was getting started. And both offered positive reviews.
I once helped “Sheriff Callie” construct a five-pointed badge – and now I think I know where she got the idea
“These would taste great if I could dip them in yogurt,” said Stargazer. (I saw no reason why she couldn’t – except that the only yogurt in the office is mine.)
“I like them so much,” said the sheriff, before comparing the taste to that of Dunkin Donuts munchkins (which she described as “little circles that have a taste inside or outside, or both”). But: “They don’t look like munchkins. They look like crackers.”
So, there you have it! All three of us enjoyed them, and as far as I know, none of us own posters of President Obama with Hitler moustaches. (I mean, I, for one, have a pretty small apartment, and I think I’d remember picking something like that up at a yard sale, for example.)
Leibniz Cocoa Biscuits
Size: 7 oz. (200g)
Price: 99¢
Worth every penny?: Absolutely. Yum.
