Remember “Ode to Vegan Chocolate Chip Cookies“?

The experience of drafting this bad poem with ChatGPT made me all warm and gooey inside.

Not vegan gooey. Gooey like chocolate chip cookies made with Real Butter.

That made me think: Would I really write an ode to vegan chocolate chip cookies? Heck, would a certified vegan write this?

I don’t know about you, but flax eggs just don’t get my poetic juices flowing.

So I asked ChatGPT to make the following subtle edit to our poetic masterpiece:

Edit the poem above to indicate dissatisfaction. I really want to like my vegan chocolate chip cookies, but damn it I crave real butter.

Coming in hot from ChatGPT’s oven:

Oh vegan chocolate chip cookies, how I try
To love you dearly, but alas, I sigh
You lack the richness, the depth of flavor
That only real butter can savor

With flour, sugar, and vegan butter,
You come together, but something’s not right
Flax eggs, a decent substitution
But, the taste, it just doesn’t ignite

Baked to perfection, golden and crisp
Your aroma, my senses, it does twist
A bite into you, a pale comparison
To the cookies, that I long for

You are the treat that I want to love
But, my cravings, for real butter, it does shove
You are kind to the earth and all its creatures
But my taste buds, for real butter, it always features

Oh vegan chocolate chip cookies, how I try
To love you, but alas, my love, it does die.

Time to bite into this verse and see how it tastes.

In a nutshell: Under-baked, but there’s definite promise.

The first glaring technical issue is meter. The distribution of stressed vs. unstressed syllables is inconsistent throughout, and the number of syllables per line goes all over the place.

In addition to sloppy meter, there are some less-than-fluid turns of phrase. Line 16 is a particularly clunky moment in the poem: “But my taste buds, for real butter, it always features.”

This is a pretty stilted way of trying to say that I crave real butter. Stilted language makes it harder to understand the poem, which makes it harder to feel things when you read or listen to the poem. And feeling things is kind of the point of poetry.

Which brings us to our next topic: things this poem does well.

My biggest bone (cookie?) to pick with “Ode to Vegan Chocolate Chip Cookies” was emotional expression. Even though that original poem used the word “divine” no fewer than three times, it didn’t convincingly capture the feeling of joy.

Turns out ChatGPT is better at writing other kinds of feelings.

“Ode” was a plain and simple serving of joy. However, in the new poem, the narrator’s feelings are a bit more complex. There’s an appreciation for the vegan chocolate chip cookies (established in the earlier poem), but the narrator truly longs for freedom and real butter.

It’s the classic dilemma of following one’s head vs. following one’s taste buds. ChatGPT does a pretty solid job of capturing this conflict with the following expressions:

• “how I try / To love you dearly” (Lines 1-2)
• “something’s just not right” (Line 6)
• “A bite into you, a pale comparison / To the cookies, that I long for” (Lines 11 and 12)
• “You are the treat that I want to love” (Line 13)

This tension of wanting to love the vegan cookie, but yearning for real butter, comes through consistently in each stanza. It’s leaps and bounds better than the “divines” of its predecessor.

The ending couplet weakens this otherwise-great element of the poem. I’m all about food, but “my love, it does die” takes the butter lovin’ a little too far.

It almost makes me pity the vegan cookie. How would it feel if it knew the narrator’s true longings?

That got me thinking: What kind of poetic expression do I want to support?

Does the world really need us to elevate the voices of butter-obsessed ingrates? Perhaps the nobler path is using poetry to give a voice to the voiceless.

The Age of Men is fading. Now dawns the Age of the Cookie.

See you next week.