Physics Nature Is Weird

If you kept mixing Oreos into their own filling forever, the ultimate cookie would end up being exactly 95.8% creme.

April 2, 2026

Original Paper

The $\infty$-Oreo$^{^\circledR}$

Vicente Bosca

arXiv · 2604.00435

The Takeaway

By treating self-referential foods as mathematical sequences, researchers solved the paradox of what happens when a snack contains a version of itself. The study provides a rigorous way to classify 'homological' foods found in supermarkets, such as M&M cookies that contain M&Ms which themselves contain cookies, and proves that such mixtures eventually reach a stable, predictable composition.

From the abstract

What happens when a food product contains a version of itself? The Oreo Loaded -- a cookie whose filling contains real Oreo cookie crumbs -- can be viewed as the result of mixing a Mega Stuf Oreo into a Mega Stuf Oreo. Iterating this process yields a sequence of increasingly self-referential cookies; taking the limit gives the $\infty$-Oreo. We model the iteration as an affine recurrence on the creme fraction of the filling, prove convergence, and compute the limit exactly: the stuf of the $\inf