More Thoughts on Breakfast Cereal

Wheaties: This cereal was closely associated with sports because we all know the role that wheat plays in building muscle. But, you had to be a pretty big sports fan to put up with a cereal that turns to mush upon seeing the milk. People in the know keep it dry and just dip each flake in milk just before they eat it.

Cap’n Crunch Cereal: The Cap’n sailed the high seas on many adventures all related in some way to a cereal specifically created to shred the palates of children. Cap’n Crunch is like the Slurpee and brain freeze: You might be in pain, but you will keep shoveling it into your mouth until you’ve made a hole all the way up to your sinuses…

Rice Krispies: The primary ingredient in an age old desert enjoyed by white anglo-saxon protestants since they wandered off of the Mayflower. It’s a fat, sugar and carbohydrate assassination device that is just a little better for you than starvation. And the fact that you melted butter AND marshmallows means that you’ve actually baked something. Kudos!

Shredded Wheat: If The Grapes of Wrath were a cereal it would be Shredded Wheat: A cereal made by people who don’t care and eaten by people who don’t care. The name is a good indicator: The didn’t put any effort into it. “Shredded Wheat” is just telling you what is in the box and what happened to it. And, it really doesn’t have a relationship with the milk. They are in two separate planes of reality… like a bale of straw tossed into a drainage ditch. It was voted the “Cereal of Reclusive Misers” four years in a row.

Cocoa Puffs: The finest insanity-based cereal produced in the United States. The ad campaign involves a manic-depressive bird named “Sonny” and his violent reaction to the cereal. You see, Cocoa Puffs, when they were first being produced, were laced with Laudanum and they were prescribe for women who had an “imbalance of the humours”…

Cocoa Krispies: If God had a mother, the fluid that would flow from her breast would be Cocoa Krispies and milk… whole milk. It’s so good that I cannot eat it anymore because the pleasure is so great, I can feel karma being stripped from my soul with each spoonful…

Sugar Smacks aka Honey Smacks aka Smacks: Puffed rice is cheap to produce and would make a swell cereal if it didn’t have the taste and texture of packing material. How do you get a nation of children to eat– what? You answered before I could finish. Did you say, “sugar”? When parents started to complain about too much sugar, they quickly got their nutritionists together to think up and new name… and so Honey Smacks was born. They finally gave up on describing the cereal at all and it just became Smacks… like the slang for heroin.

Trix: There was a successful ad campaign built around excluding the world’s only talking rabbit from the “I Ate Trix Club”. It seems cruel, but they did let people vote later and the rabbit was allowed to have Trix… just once. It turned out he had a corn allergy and his throat closed right up… who knew?

Alphabits: If the words “institutional” and “dreary” were made into a movie and that movie was made into a cereal, it would be Alphabits. It is the only commercially available cereal that tastes worse than the box it came in. When George Orwell conceived of his Ministry of Cereal in 1984, this was the cereal that he envisioned. But, let’s face it: If you’re a kid who thinks breakfast, fun and spelling go together, you probably won’t mind the unrelenting blandness…

Count Chocula: One of four horror-based cereals and probably the only one worth eating. It seemed a natural to take a mysterious, erotic and satanic character, such as Dracula, and base a chocolate and marshmallow cereal around him. It’s pretty good stuff, but it is only available in the month of October. Some people have been known to buy it by the crate when it is available. Please don’t judge us…