Oreogate Was Funny...Until It Wasn't

THE FULL STORY

I have a confession to make: I got completely sucked into Oreogate.

If your algorithm has somehow spared you, Oreogate is the increasingly bonkers saga of a group of school moms in the UK whose group chat has been chronicled online, one musical instalment at a time. It started when one mom, Michelle, asked the other parents to stop sending Oreos in their kids’ lunches because her daughter, Ava, wasn’t allowed to eat them and was getting upset when she saw her friends had them.

There was no allergy and no school rule. Michelle just didn’t want Ava eating Oreos — and thought the easiest solution was for everyone else’s kids to stop eating them, too. As you might imagine, that went over extremely well.

The saga, posted by Instagram creator @ashleighjamz, has unfolded through dozens of videos, with screenshots of the supposed chats turned into songs using the AI music platform Suno. Michelle has opinions about school lunches, but it doesn’t stop there. It veered into birthday party food and class picnics, and what other people’s children eat and are allowed to share. And, of course, the other moms have opinions about Michelle’s opinions. There are side chats and retaliatory Oreos. There was even a giant Oreo birthday cake that was apparently the request of one of the kids in the mix. 

Oreogate has escalated spectacularly, with articles (ahem) and podcasts covering the developments, and people going off online, taking one side or another (usually erring on the side of “Oreos for everyone!”). And admittedly, I, like many other people, thought the whole thing was hilarious.

I checked for new instalments every day, and I wanted to know the mysterious reason Michelle refused to allow Oreos in her household. That said, I also became mostly convinced the entire thing couldn’t possibly be real. And, to be fair, that remains a distinct possibility. The creator behind Oreogate is a paid partner of Suno and has not confirmed whether these conversations actually happened. So perhaps Michelle and her anti-Oreo crusade are entirely fictional.

But if it’s a publicity stunt, it served its purpose. It started a conversation about just how much we can expect from other parents, and whether judging and criticizing others actually achieves anything. And for this reason, after a while, I stopped laughing.

Somewhere Along the Way, It Stopped Being About Oreos

Look, I don't agree with Michelle. I might as well put that out there.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: I'm firmly in the live-and-let-live school of parenting unless someone is actually endangering their child (or their child is being endangered by others, as is the case with severe allergies). I may privately raise an eyebrow at another parent's decision — and I'm quite sure other parents have raised theirs at mine — but it would take a lot for me to tell another family what they could put in their child's lunch.

If I had a personal objection to a particular food, I'd explain it to my own child. Even when kids are little, I think information is power. This is what we do in our family. Other families have different rules. You may not always like our rules, but here's why we've made them.

That's parenting. We can't remove everything our children want but can't have. Eventually, they have to live in a world populated by people who have different rules, resources and restrictions, and self-regulation becomes paramount.

And Michelle — or the character of Michelle, if that's what we're dealing with — keeps crossing that line. Asking once is one thing. Continuing to push and trying to dictate birthday party menus and picnic food is something else. But then, somewhere around the umpteenth Oreo plot twist, I realized the other moms were starting to bother me, too.

Poking an Offensive Bear Is Still Poking the Bear

At some point, the Oreos stopped being regular lunchbox food and became ammunition. The moms deliberately added Oreos to lunchboxes and group settings, just to see what Michelle would do. And there were side conversations about Michelle that started to feel less like frustrated parents venting and more like mean-girling. And yes, Michelle kept providing material.

But that's the thing about being an adult: Someone behaving badly doesn't require you to behave badly back.

According to Tuesday's instalment, Michelle’s daughter, Ava, left a school picnic crying. And only then — after weeks of adults turning a disagreement about a six-year-old's lunch into an escalating battle — did the conversation seem to shift toward maybe, just maybe, not deliberately provoking the situation with the Oreos anymore.

My feelings had started to shift days earlier, though, as I wondered why it was still going on and why no one on either side of the group chat seemed to realize it was crossing a line. Because whatever you think of Michelle's behaviour, Ava isn't responsible for it. And if this story is real, there's a little girl sitting in the middle of a conflict she didn't create, surrounded by adults who have turned the thing she's not allowed to eat into a symbol of their dislike of her mother.

We Don't Actually Know What's Going On

There's another piece of this that has bothered me.

We don't know why Michelle is so rigid about Oreos. She apparently steadfastly refuses to explain it. Her behaviour around food certainly raises questions, sure. The intense restriction, the monitoring and the preoccupation with what other children are eating go well beyond a casual preference to limit sugar. But that's all we know.

Maybe there's a complicated history there, or maybe there’s something happening in that family nobody else understands. Maybe there's absolutely nothing behind it except having an extraordinarily strong opinion about sandwich cookies (don’t we all? Fudgee-os are where it’s at for me).

Or maybe Michelle doesn't exist.

Either way, thousands of strangers have now diagnosed, mocked and dissected a person based on snippets of a group chat served up as entertainment.

When You Have to Raise an Uncomfortable Issue With Another Parent

I've had a few run-ins with other parents. I think most of us have. Put a group of adults together whose children spend six hours a day together in the same building and eventually somebody is going to annoy somebody else. But there are mature ways to handle it. Here are just some ideas:

• Go directly to the person involved rather than recruiting an audience first.

• Stick to what happened rather than what you think it says about their parenting.

• Ask questions before making accusations.

• If it's a school issue, involve the school when appropriate rather than trying to enforce your own rules across an entire classroom.

And perhaps most importantly, know what belongs to you. You get to decide what your child eats and the rules in your home. You don’t get to police those things in other families. You can ask another parent for a consideration (like pretending Oreos are evil), but they can say no. That's the part that can be hard to swallow. 

On the flipside, you also don't have to accommodate every request just because someone makes it. "No, that doesn't work for our family" is a complete answer.

The Kids Are Watching Us, Too

And that’s something we always need to remember. The adults have spent weeks debating what lessons Michelle is teaching Ava about food. And that's a fair conversation. Being extremely restrictive or attaching moral value to particular foods can influence how children think about eating, and experts commenting on Oreogate have raised exactly that concern.

But there's another lesson being taught here, too. When someone in our circle is behaving erratically or irrationally, there’s often something else going on. To recognize that, and act with it in mind, means we don’t humiliate people for disagreeing with us or for potentially needing help. That’s the example we need to set for our kids. We don’t need to find the thing that gets the biggest reaction and keep doing it because everybody thinks it’s funny. I wish I’d come to that conclusion sooner.

Maybe Oreogate is fake. Frankly, part of me hopes it is. But somewhere between the first shared or stolen Oreo and a little girl leaving a school event in tears, I stopped wondering why Michelle hates Oreos so much.

Instead, I started wondering why the rest of us were having so much fun watching her unravel.