Dry Cereal
Bob Hansen
Dry cereal changes—God does not!
This morning, I ate a hardy bowl of Wheaties, “the breakfast of
Champions.” Call me crazy (my wife does) but I love dry cereal. I’ve been
eating it consistently for more than fifty years. Yes, I love cereal—but I
can’t count on it. Cereal changes.
Take flake size. Special K used to come in tiny flakes, about the size
of the nail on my pinky finger. Now, the flakes are much, much larger. I
believe Wheaties’ flakes were also upsized. I now feel the urge to cut the
flakes into smaller sizes before eating them. Cereal changes.
Sugar, before it was determined to be evil, was a promenade word in
cereal’s names. I don’t know if they actually adjusted the sugar content, but
they changed the names. I still think of them as “sugar cereals.” As a
precaution I eat only cereals that have something other than sugar as the first
ingredient.
I recently purchased a new, super-healthy, no-sugar cereal. The
ingredients: whole wheat kernels, whole flaxseed, barley malt, salt, niacin,
thiamin monoitrate (vitamin B1), riboflavin (vitamin
B2). I would have felt really healthy eating this cereal—except that I couldn’t
stand the taste until I added just a little sugar.
Cereals change with the shifting winds of our society. Today, I
examined every cereal box in our home. Only the single “sugar cereal” didn’t
claim to be “healthy.” A popular cereal box phrase reads: “Diets rich in
whole-grain foods and other plant foods and low in saturated fat and
cholesterol may reduce the risk of heart disease.” It’s a bit ambiguous, but I
feel better eating a cereal that has that kind of statement on the box.
A while back, when low-carbs became a hot
topic, I expected cereals to jump on the bandwagon. But I observed very little
effect, I suppose because cereal grains are carbs,
Still, low-carb is important and I assure you that
this column is low-carb.
Perhaps the supreme example of shifting cereal mores is the
kids-movie-cereal. They can only be relied upon to disappear quickly.
I recently witnessed a breakthrough in cereal-naming, a real stroke of
creative genius. The name of the cereal was, “Crunchy Hexagons.” Wow! Who was
the genius who decided to mix normal cereal characteristics with terms from the
ever-popular field of geometry?
Will this trend catch fire? Will we soon see, “Sweet Trapezoids” on the
store shelves? Can selections like, “Corny Cylinders” and “Crispy Rhombuses”
and “Wheat Parallelograms” be far behind?
Still, I suppose this innovation (as with all cereal trends) will not
last. Dry cereal cannot be counted on.
Some say that one can only rely on death and taxes. But taxes only
prevail for a lifetime. And, as it turns out, death is not a strong bastion. As
a balloon that encounters a pinprick, death has been deflated at Calvary. Death
was rendered powerless by the One who says, “Behold, I changeth
not.”
Wow! Take that dry cereal!
Bob Hansen writes from Chehalis, Washington. Bhansen6@juno.com