When I was a child, my mother indulged my appetite for my favorite sugary cereal, Cap ‘N Crunch, in all its variations: Cap 'N Crunch plain, Cap ‘N Crunch with Crunch Berries, Peanut Butter Cap 'N Crunch, and then the renamed versions of the same-tasting cereal: Quisp, Quake, and King Vitamin.
I felt compelled to taste-test all these cereal varieties the way a sommelier would taste dozens of Zinfandel wines from the same region or a fromagier would sample different types of Camembert or a musicologist would listen to hundreds of different versions of Rachmaninoff's Second Symphony.
Eating six versions of Cap 'N Crunch afforded me the illusion of variety while eating the same cereal over and over. I was a preadolescent boy who wanted to believe I had choices but at the same time didn't want any choices.
You will sometimes hear about the man who is in his sixth marriage, and his wives in terms of appearance, temperament, and personality are all more or less the same. The man keeps going back to the same woman but wants to believe he has "found someone new" to give him hope for a new life.
That was essentially my relationship with Cap 'N Crunch. Not only was I stagnant in my food tastes, but I was also regressing into sugar-coated pablum. My love of cereal, which endures to this day, was the equivalent of disappearing into my chosen comfort zone. There I found pleasure and oblivion.
In middle school, I knew a guy whose mother worked for one of the big cereal companies. She’d take home dozens and dozens of test brands of cereal and her son would show them to me. These cereals were of the sugary variety and reminded me of Count Chocula, Franken Berry and such but their names and characters were different. Sick of all the cereals his mother took home every day, the boy would give me as many boxes home as I’d like, and the cereals tasted like the ones you could buy at the store; however, they had different names, mascots, and cereal shapes.
Having these cereals in my home was like living in a bizarro parallel universe where everything seemed the same but was a little off. That period of my life still feels like a dream in which I felt I possessed potent powers that allowed me to enter a strange universe that was denied by everyone else.
Objectively speaking, there was nothing about this cereal that had the power to transport me to some enchanted universe. But cereal was more than a grain; it was an idea about happiness. It was a story about how we lived our lives. I was thinking about this while teaching Yuval Noah Harari’s best-seller Sapiens to my college students. The class is called Critical Thinking. Sapiens helped me understand my fascination with cereal. According to the book, I would not be obsessed with cereal if not for the Cognitive Revolution, which according to Harari developed from 70,000 to 30,000 years ago. This Revolution created “supple” language to form advanced communications: storytelling to create myths and legends which created self-identity, morality systems, alliances, enemies, legal systems, religions, art, gossip, collective beliefs, and social cooperation.
As children, we weren’t just eating cereal. We were connecting with characters who lived in a mythical world of boundless delights. We were playing board games that were written on the back of the box. We were looking for free prizes, which we search for like buried treasure, inside the cereal box. We were sending box tops to get submarines, shirts, hats, and other merchandise.
Cereal was part of the broad tapestry of stories 1970s America told us about living the good life and achieving success. We ate enormous amounts of granola, wheat germ, Wheaties, and Special K to promote health and fitness. We read comics promoting Charles Atlas bodybuilding programs. Our fathers shaved with rigor after watching TV ads showing Farrah Fawcett and other eager-to-please blondes rubbing shaving cream on football star Joe Namath's dimpled cheeks.
To sell cereal, you had to sell a story about finding good health. One of the most famous storytellers about cereal was the outdoor enthusiast Euell Gibbons, who was featured in Grape-Nuts ads in the 1970s. Walking in a forest, Gibbons asked us: “Ever eat a pine tree? Many parts are edible.” He was telling us a powerful story about Grape-Nuts: This cereal would connect us to the Earth, make us whole, and deliver a strong, healthy life. Eating Grape-Nuts would give us superpowers and endow us with the kind of survival skills that would allow us to go off the grid, get dumped into a rainforest, and live the rest of our days with nothing but a buck knife and a loincloth. In truth, eating the gravel-like cereal was responsible for thousands of trips to the dentist for chipped teeth and for making a crunch that was so loud we couldn't even hear the radio when we ate our breakfast.
Of all the cereals that I ate as a youngster, I still eat Grape-Nuts today. I may be addicted to the crunch and I like the malty flavor. I’ve also read that Grape-Nuts is the only store-bought cereal that hasn’t gone through extrusion, a heating process that kills nutrients. Grape-Nuts, on the other hand, is baked like a loaf of bread.
While I still eat Grape-Nuts in my early sixties, I now pour them in a coffee mug to limit the portion. Otherwise, this calorie-dense food will expand my waistline. Such draconian measures have to be taken if I'm to indulge in one of my childhood memories.
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