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Food

You Can Eat These Fidget Spinners

They just won't go away, so you might as well enjoy them in cookie form.
Screengrab via YouTube user EhAudie.

The fidget spinner is a great symbol for America's need for constant stimulation: a cheap, flimsy toy that is supposed to soothe existential malaise by flicking three circles around a bearing. While manufacturers have claimed that the spinners can alleviate symptoms of ADHD, autism, or anxiety, the obscenely popular toys have now taken a different turn—one toward another well-known need of Americans: junk food.

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Perhaps inspired by the story of a young girl almost dying after ingesting a component of her fidget spinner, the Internet now abounds with people creating "edible" fidget spinners, which don't all seem entirely edible.

A Dallas bakery called Clearly Cookies is getting in on the action (and getting eyeballs) by concocting fidget spinner cookies—as seen in the video above, complete with horrifying EDM remix background music—but these baked goods are actually far from being the first edible fidget spinner. And while three-Michelin-starred chef Eric Ripert actually had to ban fidget spinners from his kitchen for being a distraction, the toys have become an unlikely source of culinary inspiration for home cooks and YouTube users.

Skateboard bearings and hot glue seem to be the spinners and adhesives of choice for a lot of "edible" spinners (which, to reiterate, are not technically edible), but this kaleidoscope of Maynards and Mini-Eggs looks like it could be used to hypnotize someone into eating them anyway.

There are also more soigné riffs on this concept, which make use of culinary techniques to avoid chocking on dried glue and bearings, such as melting down a bunch of Jolly Ranchers into a massive mold that spins, or using a lazy Suzan base for a fondant-based spinner.

We don't really know where this trend came from or where it's going, but any food that spins, from pizza dough to meat on a spit to cotton candy, seems to capture our very short attention spans. In the case of fidget spinners, that's probably just until we move on to the next annoying, ubiquitous thing.