Special K
Kellogg’s announced this week they will be opening a fru-fru cereal bar in New York City. These are the good folks who developed a technique for flattening grains and removing most of their nutrients to make a dry product in a box the modern breakfast eater can slop some milk on and wolf down before running off to a long day at the office. We all grew up with this stuff and whole aisles in the grocery store are devoted to it. Course they figured out how to add chocolates and sugars to appeal to the kids, advertised it on the cartoon shows and addicted another generation of eaters who get their nutrients primarily from the added milk. Thanks, Dr. Kellogg.
Like most American kids who grew up on black and white Howdy Doody and Captain Kangaroo, Mars bars and processed breakfast cereals, we just took this stuff for granted. Advertising made Tony the Tiger’s sugared flakes look appealing and the Trix Rabbit made us beg for those food colored balls of basically air. We could eat an entire box of Rice Krispies and still feel hungry. We did eat entire boxes of Cap’n Crunch and felt nauseous from whatever chemical the Food Conglomerates used to artificially flavor the stuff with. It may well be the whole thing was chemical, nothing tasted anything close to wheat or corn or rice or anything else grown in soil even with healthful doses of pesticides and herbicides. Obviously, if it was advertised on Saturday morning cartoon shows, we’d demand it from our time-saving moms and they would oblige. Nowadays we should call this child abuse and the corporations who spoonfed the American family with this slop should be treated like tobacco companies and the fast food industry, purveyors of death and diabetes.
The New York cereal bar plans to charge $7.50 a bowl for their nostalgic pablum. They do, in their defense, sprinkle lemon zests and other thrilling spices to their corn flakes and they did say they weren’t going to overcharge with excessive prices like $13.50 a bowl. And the cereal baristas will definitely not add the milk themselves. Too personal a decision, they said, for them to take that privilege from the buying customer.
I guess it’s only a matter of time before we get the Oscar Meyer baloney sandwich bars and the Jiffy peanut butter and jelly cafeterias, the Hamburger Helper restaurants and the Spam counters, Frito Lay Potato Chip Delis and the Twinkie Lounges. I know we’ve been sold a bill of goods back in the Leave it to Beaver era, but seriously, do we have to have our noses rubbed in it?
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