Boring Breakfast

My breakfast this morning. Boring! Easy! Wheat Squares, juice, and coffee.

Cereal used to be every American's breakfast. Lately, national consumption figures have decreased. "Since the late 1990s, its popularity has been slowly fading. Sales, which totaled $13.9 billion in 2000, dipped last year to about $10 billion," wrote Kim Severson in the New York Times earlier this year. (See: Cereal, a Taste of Nostalgia, Looks for Its Next Chapter) 

For years, beginning in my childhood, my favorite cereal was Kellogg's Sugar Smacks, which at later times have been called Honey Smacks or just plain Smacks. I don't buy them any more because they don't taste the same. Maybe they changed the formula when production left Battle Creek, Michigan, and transferred to Mexico. (At least I think that's what happened. At one time, the boxes specified the place of manufacture, but Kellogg's doesn't disclose that any more.)

For a while in the last few years I enjoyed Trader Joe's lightly sweetened puffed wheat, which was similar but much less heavily sugary. It uses agave syrup which sounds good, but either nutritionally or taste-wise agave syrup isn't very different from sugar syrup or honey. TJ's just didn't overdo it, and didn't add sort of a chemical aftertaste that I detected in Smacks. Recently my local TJ's  hasn't been stocking this cereal anyway.

My view is that cereal is no work at all when it comes to breakfast preparation. Severson, however, says: "Almost 40 percent of the millennials surveyed by Mintel for its 2015 report said cereal was an inconvenient breakfast choice because they had to clean up after eating it." Go figure!

I do remember this: years ago we visited European friends in France at their vacation home in a very obscure village in the south of France. We arrived with a supply of our favorite breakfast cereals, which we shared. At the end of our stay our friend said she was hooked -- now she would no longer have to get up and go downstairs from their Paris apartment to the nearby bakery to bring croissants to her children then around 8 and 3 years old. They would be happy with cereal. I've probably told this story before, but I can't resist repeating it.

My cereal shelf. In plastic box: Wheat Squares purchased in large-ish
quantity from Costco. Also TJ's corn flakes, granola, and bran flakes.
And Cheerios.

OK, we too eat cereal less often these days. Sometimes we eat an omelet. Or toast and butter and jam.