Telluride Daily Planet, Friday, October 25, 2024

“Like religion, politics, and family planning, cereal is not a topic to be brought up in public. It’s too controversial.” — Erma Bombeck

There was an iconic moment 28 years ago, as the mother of a toddler, when I witnessed a parent friend hand her two kids under five, both in car seats and ready for a long drive, a freshly opened box of Lucky Charms cereal. “They’ll have plenty to do,” she said. “It’ll take them hours to pick out all the marshmallows!” This was before iPads and before movies in cars; it was pure unmitigated bribery with sugar, a distraction that probably didn’t last for more than twenty minutes, realistically. Certainly, it was a cheap babysitter.

Many of us have memories of cereal boxes on the table at breakfast, and sometimes lunch and dinner; because, the fact is, this thing called “cereal” has been around a while (late 1800s on the early brands). Depending on the type of parent you had, you might have seen more Grape Nuts and Wheaties on the table, All Bran and Raisin Bran — or Cocoa Puffs, Frosted Flakes and Cap’n Crunch. Of course, there was the rare muesli mom — I hope some of those are lurking in the wings again.

I grew up with a combo of Bran Buds dad and whatever mom (who never ate cereal but bought what we asked for). I became a Raisin Bran-ish parent, but never a diehard cereal fan myself, in spite of buying it for my family. Looking back, I know we might have had an easier time without the extra wheat and dairy.

As for the iconic Lucky Charms moment, I tailored that move a couple times by handing a whole bag of mini carrots to my daughter and friends in the back seat of the car — after a session of swimming or some such tiring thing. I knew that hungry enough, they would ingest anything in front of them; and, given the nature of root vegetables, it would take some time to get through it. One small win for fiber, chewing and polyphenols. (This is not to say I did not make mistakes regarding sugar and carbs and lack of fiber: I did and do.)

But cereal is one of those foods that really gets me thinking about being a human astronaut on this spaceship called Earth, spinning in a boundless mega-matrix of black space. How over time and evolution we have gone and processed and reprocessed and refined grains further and further into ingestible Lego-like pieces, calling them food and making entire meals out of them. It blows the mind.

Flakes, O’s, tiny toasts, stars, puffs, crunchies, you name it. Ingredients run the gamut, of course, from whole wheat, malted barley, yeast and salt (Grape Nuts) to, let’s say Fruity Pebbles (one of the best selling cereals of 2023), which contains rice, sugar, hydrogenated vegetable oil, red 40, yellow 6, turmeric oleoresin (color), blue 1, yellow 5, blue 2, and BHA.

When compared in fiber and sugar alone, Grape Nuts has a whopping 7 grams of fiber per half cup and zero added sugar, whereas Fruity Pebbles (though it is gluten free) has a micro 0.2 grams of fiber and 25% of its calories is from added sugars. These can be critical differences, given the importance of fiber in slowing down digestion and thus slowing down the process of glucose absorption into the blood — a key factor in overall health and longevity. Though Raisin Bran has added sugar as well as raisins (it’s high in sugar) , this is somewhat tempered by its 7 grams of fiber, both soluble and insoluble.

After a protracted decline in cereal sales, we saw the pandemic turn things around. People were home and looking to stock up on non-perishables, seeking comfort and nostalgia, ease, and potentially a temporary and familiar sugar buzz to accompany the all-day pajama bottoms. There was an actual run on Grape Nuts in 2021, and it became temporarily unavailable, much to its fans’ dismay.

Many sugary cereals, of the over 5,000 brands sold in the U.S. today, have persisted through more years than one would have thought possible. Profitability margin is high and brand recognition keeps people coming back. We like to stare at the boxes while we eat. But every once in a while, we have to reconsider just how odd these shaped, perforated, dyed, sweetened, flavored, beefed-up, conveyor-belted pellets are, and why per capita we eat an average 14 pounds of them per year.

It reminds me of that cartoon of a hungry person looking inside a fridge, exasperated, saying: “There’s no food here. It’s all just ingredients!” Here’s my plug for whole foods, for all the “ingredients” of the world: they already contain fiber, vitamins, minerals and a secret goodness all their own. Step one for cereal addicts: add in a few seeds, nuts, or raw oats to your Cinnamon Toast Crunch. It may be a top seller (and Taylor Swift’s favorite), but it’s probably not doing you any favors.