We have often been dismayed to go into the supermarket and see an 18-ounce package of Nabisco's Oreo cookies for about $2.50 and nearby a 9-ounce box of Nabisco Famous Chocolate Wafers – essentially the Oreos without the filling – for more than $4. Making endless excuses for our math, it appears that the filling actually has a negative cost.

We have routinely paid the extra money for the chocolate wafers, often crushing them for cheesecake crusts. We recently came across a new cheesecake cookbook, The Cheesecake Bible, in which author George Geary shamelessly tells you to chuck the correct number of Oreos into the food processor, grind them up, and let the filling take care of itself. "The icing disappears like magic," he says.

Needless to say, it has taken some days for us to get over our shock.

Without meaning to offend anyone, we are not huge fans of the Oreo filling. Despite Mr. Geary's words of assurance, we would not consciously add Oreo filling to our cheesecake crust (we are such purists, we also cringe when some fruit is spread on top of a cheesecake). We would either continue to spend the extra money for the chocolate-only wafers, or we would scrape out the filling (which it is very easy to do), use the cookie-outsides only and, yes, we would probably just throw out the filling.

Now that you've asked, we wonder why we've been spending all that extra money all along.