I am a breakfast kinda guy. I know a lot of you just get up and go, relying on a snack and some coffee or soda pop as a hold-over until lunch but I could never do that. I need some real fuel in the morning to keep me going and that means “Food” with a capital ‘f’, not crap. It’s how I was raised.
I grew up eating cold cereal for most breakfasts. Grape Nuts, Raisin Bran, Cheerios, Wheat Chex, Corn Bran, Rice Crispies, Life. We weren’t allowed to have the sugary (er) cereals even though we were allowed to dump sugar on those provided. Even under the watchful eye of my father, I was able to get a good amount of sugar on there, sometimes even enough to end up with that lightly grainy, sweet slime that collects at the bottom of an over-sugared bowl of milk.
At the same time, kids I grew up with were getting Froot Loops, Super Sugar Crisp, Honey Comb, Trix, Count Chocula, and Cookie Crisp for breakfast. When you stayed over, you got to have it, too! Some households allowed you to take the box out of the cupboard and just dig into it with your grubby fists for a snack – even if it was nowhere near breakfast time. Gee whiz! One friend’s mother went so far as to ask what cereal *I* would like to have during an overnight visit. Making sure my parents didn’t hear me I hunched over the phone and whispered: “Waffelos!”
When I was old enough to move out of my parent’s house (and into an apartment with my older brother) the breakfast cereal restrictions were officially over and I dove into a period of sugar-frosted gluttony: Lucky Charms, Captain Crunch, and Trix. My brother, evil genius that he is, discovered that you could mix them all in one bowl: Lucky Captain Trix!
We ate these cereals until the roofs of our mouths were raw with sweetened-corn abrasion. We scarfed them down until we forgot that milk was suposed to be white not brown or rainbow-hued as if muddled with filth or petroleum. We consumed bowl after bowl until I realized that I actually preferred cereals like Wheat Chex and Corn Bran … and that I liked them best without any additional sugar at all – imagine that!
Going back to the healthier cereals of my childhood made me feel pretty good about myself, mature and smart … until I realized that even these cereals were not “getting my day off to a good start.” After a bowl of cereal I wasn’t energized but sleepy, loggy. I could hold off hunger with their grainy bulk but I could not fend off fatigue. I ditched my cereal bowl and moved to a more protein rich breakfast including things like eggs, bacon, fruit juices, and vegetables. Nutty, I know.
Now, when I wander down the cold cereal aisle at the supermarket or catch sight of a commercial for said, I’m shocked. Really? People buy this multi-colored, sugar-frosted, corn-syruped, air-puffed, monkey kibble? *I* used to eat it and think it sensible?
The ad says “An important part of this complete breakfast” then flashes a quick picture on the screen containing one glass of orange juice, one glass of milk, a fried egg, toast with jam, a steaming bowl of oatmeal, three pancakes, four sausage links, two stalks of celery, three slices of honey-glazed ham, half a grapefruit, a serving of biscuits and gravy, a sprig of parsley, and the aforementioned cereal, front and center, garnished with large chunks of dew-dappled, fresh fruit in a big, almost overflowing bowl, the multi-colored bits of puffed corn looking like the alien packing material it is.
What does this tell you? It tells you that the “complete breakfast” would take an hour to prepare, two grown men to eat, and that you could say the same thing about the nutritional value of the meal if you replaced the cereal in the shot with a half empty can of shoe polish covered in frosting: the cereal provides nothing! Less than nothing! The other food is there to make sure you get some nutrition *and* counterbalance the negative effects of their Sugar Injected Corn Pulpies. No amount of singing, prat-falling, or other derivative buffoonery by the cereal’s insipid, computer animated, cartoon mascot can possibly rectify the heinous insult this supposed breakfast food represents.
What they mean when they say it is an “important” part of the breakfast is that it is important for them to get you to eat this crap so they can go on making a living, that they need you to get addicted to high-fructose corn syrup because that’s a building block of our muffin-topped, firmly-packed, diabetic nation, that the only reason the breakfast is complete with their sugared crunchies in it is because you’ve been trained to think that the cereal *is* breakfast when, in fact, it never could be. It’s just filler, like wood shavings or pea gravel. It’s the nutritional equivalent of wadded-up newsprint.
