Turning Trix

Box of Trix

We are, at the moment, in Charleston, South Carolina. It is a very pleasant city to be in. At least, it is in winter when the humidity and heat and mosquitoes aren’t out of control. We are told that in summer it turns worse. For the time being, though, it’s pretty delightful. It has the feel, the air, of a Caribbean city, but better maintained, and with more wealth and most of the luxuries that make living in the US easy. It’s full of great restaurants – lots of farm-to-table southern cooking, but refined and elevated. It may have even more really great bars making interesting, but still good, cocktails. It’s easy to get around. The houses are lovely and old and full of character. It’s surrounded by a beautiful harbour full of dolphins. It is, really, a very, very nice place indeed.

Yesterday, on a drizzly day, we decided to take a day trip to Myrtle Beach, which we knew was a beach resort on a strand, but didn’t know much else. It is grim. Grim, grim, grim. A hugely unpleasant, soulless place. It reminded me mostly of pictures of those Spanish resort towns that the British infested in the 1980s. A waterfront of ugly, tall, identikit concrete hotels, with no character whatsoever, it was even hard to see the ocean despite driving Ocean Boulevard. The overwhelming characteristic was of decay – these were hotels put up 15 or 20 years ago that have had no maintenance done since. One core characteristic was swimming pools full of faded and chipped waterslides that had once competed to be the most ludicrously over the top and tacky. They often go for a theme, like Polynesia or aquarium, but sometimes just for abstract art. So you sometimes see a lime green shark that a child will slide out of the mouth of, or a purple octopus that they’ll shoot  down the legs of. And sometimes you’ll see something like 30 year old bad Austrian municipal public art, all electric colours and lightning flashes and spheres. This being mid-December, everything was shut. I’ve had a penchant for off-season resort towns for a long time; but Myrtle Beach had none of the charm. There was no waterfront to play on. The shops and restaurants weren’t open even in the hope of getting the passing trade of rubberneckers like me. It was grim.

My eyes hurt just looking at the back of the box. Ow.

Trix Fruitalicious Swirls are definitely more Myrtle Beach than Charleston. They are unutterably nasty. They are deeply unpleasant - and the ugly swirls remind me of the garishly coloured and nasty pools and waterparks.

Trix is, itself,  a brand of cereal here in the US, with quite a lot of history, or at least cultural background: Beth has repeated the advertising tagline “Silly Rabbit, Trix are for kids” to me many time. But I’ve not tried them yet, so can’t compare the Fruitalicious Swirls with their parent cereal. The most obvious comparison for me is with Froot Loops, which I wrote about a while back.

At first taste, Trix Fruitalicious Swirls win. Not just on the spelling of Fruit, either. The actual flavour is better. It’s marginally less artificial, and there’s an underlying cereal flavour which didn’t exist with Froot Loops. There’s something that’s actually holding the chemicals in place.

That said, they’re still not great. The fruit flavours are pretty foul, and fake. And the colours are scary – looking like a mix of diseased sloes and mushy peas and over-seasoned cheesy puffs. They leach out into the milk. After a while, the colours all merge to make a sort of pale puce, or washed out mauve. That is the more appealing side. Before the colours merge, the individual separate colours seep out in to the surrounding liquid so you see a blue halo of milk around the blue cereal. And if there’s one thing I know in life, it’s that milk shouldn’t be blue.

Would you want your children eating these? Really?

Whilst I was eating them, the swirls seemed just about tolerable. In the minutes afterwards, though, things got much, much worse. The residue that was left behind in my mouth, of chemicals and sugar, created flavours and sensations that I don’t want repeated. There were  smells that I’m pretty sure Beth doesn’t want to happen ever again; a lot of acid and chemical that couldn’t be got rid of,  even with a lot of brushing of teeth, and tongue, and mouth, and with mouthwash.

The nutritional value, too, appears to be nil. No more than an hour after breakfast, on our drive towards Myrtle Beach, I felt like I’d not eaten for weeks. I was famished. I’m pretty much convinced that the Trix Swirls had dissolved as sugar and chemicals, and had performed no useful function for my anatomy whatsoever.

There is no old world charm about Trix Fruitalicious Swirls. They are nasty, overwhelming, soul destroying, modern but without any modern appeal, and they leave a gruesome aftertaste: they are definitely the Myrtle Beach, not the Charleston, of breakfast cereals.

Blegh.

Breakfast of Champions

Athlete, pre-race

When I started thinking about writing this blog post, I was going to head it up “Breakfast of Champions” as a mocking sort of title, taking it from Kurt Vonnegut’s novel of that name. It turns out that the joke is on me.  To prove quite how much I’m coming to the US cereal scene blind, I was completely oblivious to the fact that “Breakfast of Champions” was the tagline of Wheaties, the cereal I was about to write about.

I was going to call it Breakfast of Champions because it had fuelled me to a moment of sporting triumph.

We’d arrived in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee – the home of Dolly Parton. It’s the Las Vegas of the hillbilly country music south, but without the drinking or gambling. It’s all bright lights, crappy amusement centres, bad hotels and Dollywood. Dollywood actually has some great rollercoasters, but the clientele could have lived up to every cliché. Few teeth, bad hats, plaid shirts and an excess of religion.

Along with all the tat, Pigeon Forge is also the gateway to the Great Smoky Mountain National Park – the setting is pretty stunning.  And it was where the first Smoky Mountain Santa Hustle was taking place. Beth, like the sadist she is, had entered me into a 5km race, along with Skip and Mark who’d joined us for Susan’s 40^th. I’d never run a serious, group race before. My natural pace is very, very slow. The omens were bad. Even worse when I knew I had to run in a Santa hat, and I was going to start wearing a Santa beard, the morning after a big blow-out 40^th birthday party – the county may be dry and alcohol free, but our cabin was not.

But, on the morning of the race I had a bowl of Wheaties Fuel. [Beth suggested this edit:] My gorgeous and brilliant wife (who I wrongly accused as a sadist in the paragraph above) had selected it for me especially for the raceday having a better understanding of what good American cereal is and a little sick of me going for just the most outrageously coloured boxes. Along with a number of other benefits, it definitely got me to the finish, and fast, under 27 minutes. 9^th in my age group. Now, 9^th might not be considered “champion” by some. But when your expectations are as low as mine were, it’s a massive achievement. 

Before I get on to the Wheaties, though, I’d better run through the other things that may have improved my performance:

-        I had a bit of a hangover, and perhaps the booze was still in the system

-        Running with Mark and Skip who paced and pushed me brilliantly

-        A peanut butter Clif bar, possibly the best tasting and textured energy bar I’ve ever had

-        Ice cold weather (substantially below freezing) meant you’d better run fast enough to stay warm

For the time being I’m giving credit to the Wheaties Fuel. These aren’t the traditional Wheaties. They’re one of the many subcategories of cereal that exist in the US.

One actual portion of breakfast

One great thing is that unlike a lot of other cereals, they aren’t trying to prove some kind of worthiness or low-calorieness. There’s much less of a lie about them. They know they’re full of calories and don’t really care. The crazy high sugar cereals of the US claim to have “120 calories” in a serving, Wheaties Fuel says bollocks to that and admits to 220 or so. It’s still the same sized portion – ¾ of a cup – but it’s high density, heavy and lovely, unlike the puffy things which are all air, inflated, meaning that ¾ of a cup weighs about 2 grams.  Laughably, of course, 120 calories isn’t enough for breakfast. It’s 1/10 of the amount of calories even the scrawniest dieting freak supermodel needs for a day. And breakfast is meant to be the biggest meal of the day. It’s a world of stupid out there.

Not Wheaties Fuel. They actually do what they’re meant to. They give you enough to get going.

And not only that, they’re delicious, too.  They’re by far the best cereal that I’ve had so far on this trip. There’s a heavy wheaty, cereally thing, in the flakes (apparently bran). And there’s something like puffed rice, but thinner and crunchier. The flavour has something malty in it, and some honey (Beth says that I sound like I’m describing a beer, which might be why I’m such a fan). It’s really, really nice. Not too sweet, but sweet enough to be edible.

Basically, Wheaties Fuel seem to be fantastic.

 I am told that there are sports champions on the Wheaties box, and that pretty much every kid in the US takes up sports not so that they’re obsessed with winning the 3 man coxless luge in the Olympics, but because the Olympic gold medal would give them a chance of a place on the box – but I don’t think I’ll be getting my face on a packet any time soon. 9^th place in the 40-45 age group in a field on 1000 runners is great, but not quite that great.

The next Wheaties box

Bearly Anything.

Granola, at last!

After weeks of eating sugary and fake cereals, I finally succumbed to my craving for something a bit more normal for me. I needed muesli or granola. Something made with real oats, where I could actually identify the ingredients, full of slow-burn complex carbs, which would fill me up for more than a few minutes.

Bear Naked brand of granola has seemed to me to be the dominant high-quality granola on the shelves here in the US. The price certainly suggests quality, so I’ve gone with the Bear Naked Fit Vanilla Almond Crunch granola. That’s surely a bunch of words put together where you can’t possible go wrong.

Well, I was mistaken. One thing I was expecting was the utterly, utterly laughable portion size: granola is high in calories, so you know that the manufacturers have to cheat a bit. I hadn’t realized quite how much, though. The picture doesn’t quite do this justice, but the portion size is ¼ of a cup. To anyone in the UK who wants to know how much that is, it’s 1/10 of a UK pint. And that is how they can pretend you’ll get 11 portions of breakfast out of this tiny bag which costs $5.

They really think this is enough for a person? Really?

This is risible. And they should stop pretending. Nobody in their right mind is going to resent spending $1 on breakfast instead of 50c, which would be $3.50 extra a week, which frankly will bother almost nobody’s wallet. But no, the companies still think we need “value” for money which they push by pretending we’ll eat a minute portion of food.

The other thing is that granola is meant to be healthy. And for the idiots at Bear Naked – or possibly the idiots in the US public who buy the garbage misinformation they’ve been fed - a health food has to be low in calories and fat and sugar. So now that a portion is the size of my fingernail, it only has 4 grams of sugar in it and only 120 calories. Someone really thinks we’re idiots. I am eating a breakfast cereal made of oats coated in honey. Of course it’s full of sugar. And, even more, of course it’s full of calories. I’m eating oats because I want calories. I want something that will sustain me.  As long as they’re the right kinds of sugars and calories, you can actually have sugar and calories in a healthy food.

Over here in the US, granola means more than just a breakfast cereal. It’s an adjective, used a bit like I would use the word “worthy”, to describe things and people. But it’s more than that, really. It’s more about wealthy people who’ve chosen to be way, way too serious. People who wear knitted tofu kaftans and sandals made out of processed hemp. Who ride bicycles made out of bamboo and shop at the local coop and grow their own mung beans (who, ironically, would never, ever, ever buy a granola that comes in a plastic packet, let alone one that’s made by a subsidiary of a monstrous multinational like Kelloggs), who’ve given up on anything actually enjoyable and whose only pleasures are being dour and making everyone else feel guilty about their choices.  

This granola is like that. It feels like it’s nagging you about how incredibly good and healthy and worthwhile and serious it is, and there’s no joy at all to be had. How you can get granola this wrong? I don’t know, but they’ve managed it. The texture is grim, chewy and stale. So stale that I actually checked the package to make sure it wasn’t out of date (nope, another 9 months left). There’s no good flavour here either, apart from the oats themselves. The vanilla works against us for once, the almonds are rare and hidden. This is absolutely rubbish stuff. Maybe I have been underestimating the British oat-cereal manufacturers, because if this is the best America can do, this is one field in which my nation wins. I want to be like a school teacher: “Go back and do it again, but do it right this time. Stop lying. Use some butter. Stop trying to make it healthy in ways it shouldn’t be and just leave it healthy in ways it should be.”

Granola should be the food you’d want to eat before you climb a mountain. This is something you’d feel guilty about lining a hamster cage with.

Culinary integrity – 1 Because oats and honey can’t be completely wrong. But I am being generous.

Fun – 0. Completely joyless to eat.

Bonkers Americanness – 0 (unless you consider the intention to make people eat gritty cardboard bonkers)

The Traditional Middle America

Aaah! Normal!

There are a number of definitions of where the middle of the USA actually is. One of the more widely used ones is the geographical centre – the place where, if you placed a rigid (uniformly thick) map of the USA, the country would balance on a point. Assuming that you don’t include Alaska and Hawaii (which is not unreasonable as they aren’t attached to the rest of the country so the experiment would be silly), this is somewhere near Lebanon, Kansas.

Another of the widely used definitions is the mean centre of population. This assumes that every person in the US is of equal size and weight and are standing on our rigid map (which now weighsnothing). This is, of course, a daft thought experiment because anyone who’s visited the US knows that Americans aren’t uniform size and weight. But assuming that the people in Nebraska are the same weight as the people in New York, this middle of America is near Plato, Missouri. I absolutely love this map - it tells so much with how the middle has moved since 1790 – showing the Louisiana purchase, showing the growth of the industrial north as it pulls towards Chicago and Detroit, showing the growth of California since 1900, and Texas and the south since 1950 along with the decline of the the rust belt.

We were pretty much half-way between these two middles of America, in Lawrence, Kansas, last week. I was still suffering the ill effects of eating the Froot Loops and needed something tamer, safer, less sugary, less out of control.

One of the really traditional US cereals is (or do I mean “are”?) Cheerios. These have the same form as the Froot Loops, little crunchy donuts, but are the colour of real food, and have been an American staple since long before I first came to America. When I ask normal people what their favourite cereal is Cheerios (or one of their offspring, like Honey-Nut Cheerios) tend to be the most common answer. They are very “Middle America”.

A bowl of perfectly normal food. Wow.

These were the first oat based processed cereal ever made, and are a proper cultural icon: all the way from Charlie Brown being their mascot to Sue Sylvester’s cheerleading team on Glee being called The Cheerios.  Everyone knows what they are, and they’re held in high esteem across the board. Not everyone loves them, but they are respected. A bit like Weetabix in the UK, I guess.

Beth tells me that they’re the snack food for young children in this country: that you can’t find a stroller or the backseat of a minivan without Cheerios stuck to it.

I pretty much knew what I was expecting here – which is the reason I went for them – a taste of actual cereal, crunchy, filling, not too much sugar. Something safe.

Unsurprisingly, I was mostly right, given that I’d eaten Cheerios before. They are good. Really very good. They taste of oats, they’re crunchy, and they’re pretty delicious. It’s a full flavour, with just a little nuttiness.

The only other thing of note was that they’re just not sweet enough for me these days. People eat Cheerios unsweetened which is just a little too cardboardy for my tastes – I had to add a little sugar, and they became properly delicious and simple. I’m expecting some of the derivatives to be up amongst my favourite things on my quest. This is actually good breakfast cereal.

Scoring:

Culinary Integrity – 9. They are actually real food. Nice, high quality and tasty. Tasting of real ingredients.

Pleasure to eat - 7. Not only are they real food, but pretty good to eat. There isn’t anything actually exciting here. Fairly mundane. But good.

Bonkers Americanness – 2. Despite being basically an American staple, they just aren’t at all mad. There’s no insanity at all. 

The Dark Heart of America

Fear in a box

Like a modern day Marlow, I’ve ventured into the heart of America, literally and figuratively. Yesterday we travelled 800 miles across New Mexico, Oklahoma and Kansas, into the deepest middle of America, US Route 56 my Congo River: it was all those things you imagine about prairies and plains and dustbowls. And today I ate Froot Loops.

On the literal front, the heart of America is not at all dark. It’s surprisingly beautiful (although perhaps it would get boring after a while) – big wide expanses, the mountains changing to rolling hills slowly flattening out as we headed east; immense grasslands with the occasional windmill presiding over them. The people were friendly. And the sky was huge - an immense canopy of blue and brightness.

On the figurative front, though, the heart of America is black. Anywhere that can dream up the Froot Loop, let alone sell it, let alone choose to buy and eat it, is a sick, sick, sick place. It’s wrong in the head, wrong in the soul. The very fact of Froot Loops makes me scared to be in this country.

My expectations were low, very low - sufficiently low that I chose the lobby of a Hampton Inn to experiment with this monster. I pretty much knew that I had no desire to buy or eat an entire pack, and the hotel kindly offered a mini-pack. The name and colours told me that it would be deeply fake and suggested it would be deeply unpleasant.

Fear in a packet

My prejudices were entirely correct. Except that the colours were perhaps more hideous than I’d even thought from the packet and the advertising. Luminous and yet washed out. The packet advertises “Good source of fiber” and “Made with whole grain”, as if this is a health food. You can tell how healthy Froot Loops are going to be by checking out the ingredients list. Item number one, the main ingredient, is “Sugar”. How can you actually make something that stays stable in milk rather than dissolving when it’s made primarily out of sugar? There has to be some brilliant industrial chemistry at work – unfortunately, brilliant chemistry doesn’t always mean “nice” or “tasty”. Perhaps that chemical stabiliser is “Froot”. Froot certainly bears little resemblance to the similarly pronounced “Fruit”.

Leopold II in a bowl

So how do they taste? Nasty. Immensely, immensely nasty. Unutterably nasty. Vile. Hideous. They are quite lightweight and dry, like a dehydrated sponge mixed with cardboard. But the texture isn’t the big problem. The problem is the flavour. They taste a bit like fruit flavoured sweeties, like Starburst or Refreshers in the UK. Except weaker, washed out – it has all of the bad flavour, but somehow watery and more chemical. Yet it manages to get worse, because now you’re putting dry, bad, washed out Starburst, with none of the acid you’d actually like from fruit that gives it life, into milk. Why? Why oh why oh why? What would possess you? What kind of sick, diseased nation would produce this?

The author after a mouth full of cereal hell

Like some 19^th century European observer seeing the Congo Free State as a glorious, highly productive nation indicating what might come from the future of Africa, unaware of what was going on in the interior, people outside might see the US as a global superpower, the home of so much of the music we listen to, of movies, of awesome scenery, of hamburgers and hot dogs, of almost all the technological innovation we see, of space travel and air travel, a wonderful, magical awesome country. But they don’t see that this is a country that eats Froot Loops.

One positive note: for once the “portion size” is not too small. There is no way that any human could eat an entire portion of this stuff.

Wow. That is all. Wow.

The scores, should we need them:

Culinary Integrity: 0. Nil. Nothing. Zilch. Blegh.

Fun: 0, again. There’s just nothing redeeming at all.

Bonkers Americanness: 10. Full marks for insanity. Look at the colours. Think about what kind of person would even try and create this. It is the work of a crazed evil genius.

Waffling on

Real and Fake flavour!

A while back, I was watching Heston Blumenthal’s TV show where he was trying to produce the perfect food for British Airways. Apparently flavours become less pronounced in the pressurised cabin. I checked what the cabin pressure is on a standard airliner, defined as “effective cabin altitude”: generally it’s kept at the equivalent of 7000 feet. The other factor that Blumenthal was concerned about in an aircraft cabin was the very dry air.

Here in Flagstaff, Arizona, at the edge of the Colorado Plateau, we are at 7000 feet. We are in the high desert, with a super-dry atmosphere. It should, effectively, be the same as inside a 747.

This means that we should have the same flavour and taste impairment as your average airline passenger. Blumenthal ran some experiments that suggested that the ability to taste the four standard flavours of western cuisine (sweet, salty, sour and bitter) are heavily suppressed in aeroplane conditions, yet the ability to taste umami (the savoury flavour) is untouched. This means that you should be eating shiitake mushrooms with wasabi and parmesan when you’re at altitude.

What does this all have to do with breakfast cereal? My feeling is that my tastebuds are impaired. Horribly impaired. The second cereal in my attempt to work my way through the aisle is Kelloggs Eggo Cereal. And, disturbingly, I thought it was pretty good.

Prior to tasting it, I wrote this as my prediction:
How is this going to work as a cereal? Well, I honestly have no idea – I think it might be better, earthier, less fake than the Reese’s. Waffle is a fairly plain base flavour. I’m mostly scared of the artificial maple, which might be very chemical indeed if it’s not just sugar syrup. I’m really pretty optimistic, though.

Eggo are a brand of frozen waffles that Beth loves: the kind of thing that has almost no flavour and whose texture is pleasing but deeply artificial. The conversion into a cereal seems a bit bizarre, given that waffles are already a breakfast product. So it appears to be entirely redundant.

To my surprise, the cereal actually tastes quite good. You will see on the packet that they proudly proclaim that the cereal has “natural and artificial flavor” which seems very odd to me as an advertising gimmick (if you think the natural is good, surely you’d want to shut up about the artificial?). And it really scared me. Artificial maple is not always a good thing, and here in the US syrup isn’t even maple at all, but is just a sugar solution.

My guess is that, in finding the Eggo not too sweet, and finding the maple not too disgusting, the altitude is at work here. So I suggest taking my review with a pinch of salt (or, I suppose, parmesan...). I particularly doubt my ability to taste the sugar given how I once again had a sugar-crash a couple of hours after eating. And, unlike the Reese’s, I didn’t overfill my bowl. This time, the portion size isn’t quite as outrageously small. It is one cup – not enough to make you full, but not as laughable as the ¾ cup that Reese’s suggested.

One meagre-looking portion of Eggo

What I could tell of the flavour was that there was nothing waffly at all, the maple was pretty authentic and not too dominant. The texture was nice, but the Eggos got soggy very fast, even faster than I could shovel them into my throat. I think that was the worst of it. They really aren’t bad at all.

One laughable discovery came on the back of the packet. Every “fun” cereal has to have some kind of entertainment on the back of the packet – I suspect the most reading that some people do in a day is the back of the cereal box – and Eggo have come up with a marketing tagline below. Now, I don’t know who thought this up, but surely the target market for this product haven’t been listening to their Huey Lewis and The News mix too often...

The scores on the doors for Kelloggs Eggo Waffle Cereal are as follows:

Integrity: 6 (with altitude related caveats). Good texture, mapleness is solid and realistic, maple and waffle are naturally related flavours so it goes OK. There’s clearly too much sugar for a higher score, given my later-in-the-day shakes.

Fun: 7 – who couldn’t be excited by maple waffle cereal as an idea? And nicely crunchy. Nothing entertaining in the colour department, though.

Only-in-America: 9 – who else would even think of this? The frozen waffle is itself a US-only concoction. Maple is a very American sort of flavour. And the idea of turning a breakfast product into breakfast cereal is something only an American would even consider.

Land of Milk and Humvee

One thing I’ve found since getting to America is how easy some things that used to be difficult are, and how difficult some things that used to be easy are. Recent experiences highlight both ends of that spectrum.

I commented when writing about the Reese’s Puffs about how they float in the milk. What that means is that there’s almost inevitably some milk wasted, left at the bottom of the bowl. As it happens, this is not too much of a problem – because here in the US it’s almost impossible to buy a “pint of milk”. The first problem is working out what “milk” is. It’s something I’ve noticed in the past. You can buy skim milk, 1% low fat milk, 2% reduced fat milk, calcium enhanced milk, vitamin D enhanced milk, half and half (which I believe is half cream, half milk), fat-free half-and-half (which I believe makes no sense), soy milk, buttermilk, enhanced calcium fat free soy milk, lactose free milk (no, really...). But nowhere is there “milk”. Regular, normal, everyday milk. At least, that’s how it appears.

I have learned that all milk in the US is enhanced with vitamin D – like fluoridation of water, years ago some US government agency decided that the best way to get the public to consume certain things is by just sneaking it in to widely eaten food (iodine in salt, folic acid in grains). “Trying to put foreign substances into our precious bodily fluids” as General Jack D Ripper might have said. All of which means that “Vitamin D Enhanced Milk” is what we would call milk.

At least now, that problem is resolved – I can buy milk.

But even so, I’m not sure that you can buy just a pint. In most of the supermarkets it appears that the smallest amount of milk you can buy is half a gallon. We have seen a 2 pint container. 1 pint, a portion size suitable for one person, just doesn’t seem to be available. We’ve noticed this with other groceries, too. It is really, really hard to buy one meal’s worth of food. We bought the smallest packets of green beans we could find a few days ago, and despite feeding four people for three meals we are only half-way through. It appears that the grocery stores here assume that you’re catering to a family of 16, you’re happy to eat the same thing for 6 consecutive days, or you’re happy to throw huge amounts of food in the bin. It’s nearly impossible to just buy enough food for two people for one dinner.

In contrast to the difficulty of buying a pint of milk, it was astonishingly easy to get a driving licence. There is no way that I am safe to drive in the US, less still in the immense SUV that we bought, driving an automatic transmission when I have no idea how to. Yet the Arizona department of motor vehicles seemed almost desperate to get me licenced. I had thought that as a foreign tourist it would be impossible, I’d need a social security number, a permanent address, and many other bits of bureaucracy. But no: just show them the passport, and pass a pretty basic multi-choice test (take 10 minutes reading the Arizona highway code, and you’ll be fine), and then you’re sent out with an examiner. Unlike in the UK, where you have to wait weeks and weeks for appointments, here in Flagstaff I just walked in, and an hour later was taking my test. Which was: drive around the parking lot. Parallel park between some orange cones (and even then, the examiner told me I was slightly missing and then told me when to turn the wheel, which I think showed how desperate she was for me to pass). And then drive around the block. Left turn, right turn, left turn, left turn, right turn back into the parking lot. And that is it. I have an Arizona drivers licence. With a pretty picture of the Grand Canyon on it.

Now I have my driving licence, I’m delegating most of the driving back to Beth – both of us are more comfortable that way.

Yesterday, we went on our first visit to Walmart, and I admired the range of ludicrous cereals on offer. It fills me with hope that this blog actually makes sense. Whilst there I chose to buy my second box of cereal. I’ve not quite finished the Reese’s yet, but next on the list... well, you’ll have to wait until tomorrow to find out what it is.

* Note: The title has some artistic license for the benefit of punning

The March of 1000 Miles Starts With a Single Bowl of Peanut Butter Cereal

My first cereal: Reese’s Puffs. Why did I choose these? For my first bowl I really do have to have something that looks incredibly American. What better than the cereal form of the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup?

Reese’s have been diversifying like mad recently, with any number of forms of the peanut butter cup appearing – giants, miniatures, selects, in cookies. So perhaps it’s no surprise they’ve ventured to the cereal aisle, too. Peanut butter cups are delicious, peanut butter and chocolate making a fantastic taste-pairing, so part of me expects everything Reese’s touch to be wonderful.

What do I really expect? As someone who’s not a fan of chocolate at breakfast (except in a pain-au-chocolat) my hopes aren’t high. I’m expecting something crazily sweet, which colours the milk making even the milk nasty. I do expect the peanut butter to elevate the cereal a bit, and make it edible enough for me to finish the pack. But the puffs will be way, way, way too sugary.

And the reality? Much better than I expected, but hardly perfect. There isn’t that disgusting fake-chocolate flavour that I feared. They have a really nice crunch, and a good grain-flavour under the peanut-butter. The peanuttyness is very welcome, and a bit like those peanut puffs you get in France or Germany as a salty snack to go with your beer. Also on the positive side, the crunchiness remains while in the milk.

On the other hand, remaining crunchy is actually quite easy if the cereal floats, keeping part of it above the milk-line never getting damp. Which the Reese’s Puff does. I’m not a fan of floating cereal; it makes it hard to mix properly with milk, and it also gives a false impression of how much you’ve got left in the bowl.

Which brings me to an ongoing complaint of mine: portion size. Apparently in a packet of Reese’s Puffs, there are 12 servings. And, they say, a serving only has 120 calories implying that this is a perfectly healthy, low calorie, diet breakfast. 12 servings my arse! A serving is, I read on the side of the packet, ¾ of a cup. You can see in the photo below what that actually means. It barely covers the bottom of a bowl. Is this really an amount of food anyone thinks will be suitable to set you up for a day.

One "portion" of puffs

Also on the negative side is the cloying sweetness. Whilst eating them, the puffs seemed to be fairly normal and quite pleasant, but now – 20 minutes after finishing the bowl – I have a nasty, sticky, almost acidic sweetness at the sides of the tongue and inside my cheeks. My mouth is just reacting against the overpowering sugar that is in these things. They may be OK to eat, but the aftertaste (perhaps even aftermath) is grim. There’s an artificiality that you don’t pick up at the beginning, too, but which grows and grows. In principle, I don’t object at all to artificial flavouring and sometimes find it quite wonderful, but when it tastes like someone has emptied an 8 year old’s chemistry set into my mouth – as this does – it’s not for me.

The scoring for the first cereal is as follows:

Culinary Integrity: 4 (for the peanut and the corn, mostly)
Fun: 7 (very fun to eat, but much less so in the minutes afterwards)
Bonkers Americanness: 8 (Very high in terms of American, less so on the complete madness side of things)

A Few Cereal Free Days After Arrival

Having decided to write a blog about American breakfast cereal, it’s ironic that 4 mornings after arriving in the country I’ve not eaten any yet. I call it “pacing myself”.

The journey and arrival was really very painless. I’d like to say thanks for all the help from all the friends. Staying with Sarah and Greg who made life so easy for us at the London end before setting off, and with Susan and Skip who’ve been fantastic hosts since we arrived in Arizona, has made everything much less stressful and painful than it might have been. We’ve had great hosts at both ends, and people doing so much for us.

At the border, despite their horrible reputation the US immigration and customs people were nice and charming rather than obstructive and difficult. I think us Brits just aren’t used to being asked questions by people in uniform, which is why lots of people think they are getting interrogated at the border. In fact, when I get asked:
“Why are you here?”
“To eat breakfast cereal.”
“What varieties are you going to try?”
“I’ll try everything.”
“I recommend the butterscotch lemon Trix.”

I know that it’s basically friendliness.

As I’m writing a blog about breakfast cereal, I’m going to talk about eggs and bagels. Here we are in Tucson, and on our first day we had a nice proper American big restaurant breakfast at the Blue Willow, where I had a monstrously large portion of scrambled eggs with chicken and salsa verde and chiles and things. This is a form of the American breakfast that I won’t be writing much about, but which they tend to do much better than us in the UK. The “Big Cooked Breakfast” (Full English, we call it, as if nobody else has worked out that bacon and eggs can be served in the morning) is something the Brits have self-mythologised about for a long time, but over here, there’s a lot more variety, and you can actually get it in restaurants and not just hotels and greasy spoon cafes, and you can get it at any time of day.

Since then, we’ve been eating bagels for breakfast: if any of you Americans had ever had a British bagel, you’d understand why. A bagel in the UK is slightly stale bread made in a toroidal form. The shape is the only similarity with even chain-store bagels in the US. We’ve come to America and have the chance to eat real bagels, so we’re not going to turn it down. Delicious, boiled, baked, huge range of flavours: Salt; garlic; cinnamon sugar; rosemary and olive oil. Lovely. A note to British readers, here: Don’t let bagel vendors put cream cheese on your bagel for you. They are under the impression that it should be spread a couple of centimetres thick. So much that they become impossible to eat.

But there hadn’t been a sight of cereal until this afternoon. We took a drive to the western half of Saguaro National Park – there are enclaves on the east and west side of the city - which we’d not seen before. The last time we were in town we were in the eastern half, it was New Year’s Day a couple of years back, and we were stopped by a park ranger of having been (falsely) reported as having drugs in our car. This time there were no reports of drugs, and not even any park police. There was just a stunning drive amongst the cactus and the beautiful desert mountains: my favourite kind of scenery which is in abundance around here. What a great way to spend a Saturday afternoon. On the way home we headed to the shop to pick up a few things. My preconceived notions of the variety on offer in the cereal aisle were slightly disabused – the choice a little disappointing, but that may be because Target isn’t really a grocery shop in the traditional sense. I hope they just had a small selection of what will be on offer elsewhere. But what was on show was sufficiently mad that I know I have some sugar and tartrazine crashes coming in my future. And I have bought my first packet.

Which means that the first instalment of Andy V Cereal starts properly tomorrow.

What is Andy Vs The Cereal Aisle?

What is Andy Vs The Cereal Aisle?
We’re leaving for America. It’s an exciting time, and a scary one. In 9 days I get on a plane for Phoenix, to basically start afresh in the land of dreams. I’m joining the huddled masses at the not very Ellis Island-like Sky Harbour International Airport.

And what are we going to be doing there? Well, there are two answers to that. The first, more serious one, is that we will be itinerantly travelling the Great American West. Peripatetic visitors to town after town, we’ll be stopping off and trying cities and towns out to see how we like them.

The other answer, the more frivolous one, is that I intend to eat my way through the cereal aisle. I have a romantic vision of American cereal boxes as being bright and glorious and mad, the variety and choice being crazed compared to what you see in Europe. I’ve always wondered what frosted marshmallow chocolate fruit spirals would actually taste like. Now is finally my chance to find out. I want to try every single cereal I can find. All of them. Each variety of each type of cereal. It's possible the lab-coats at Nabisco and Kelloggs might not let me get there, they might invent more quickly than I can eat. But I’m going to try. And I’ll let you know what I think. A funny thing about this is that I'm not much of a cereal eater. Here in Britain, I normally stick to boring muesli. And these days we actually have decent muesli here, rather than the scrapings from the carpenter’s floor. I think I’ll begin to miss it after weeks of sugary madness. The Dorset Cereals muesli that I normally eat is terribly middle class: I think every single house we looked at buying in Clapham’s Nappy Valley a few years back had a box on the shelves, prominently visible. Perhaps that means it's even aspirational, recommended by estate agents as an easier option than the smell of fresh baked bread to tell people how homely but upmarket the property is. But it’s also good. Nice textures, nice crunch, nice balance of fruity and nutty (as someone who likes nuts, it’s odd that I find their nuttiest one slightly unappealing). And I’ve just had the last of it. Eaten out of a paper bowl, using plastic cutlery, as all the real cutlery and crockery is in a container waiting at Tilbury Docks to head out west on its own great adventure.

What am I looking for, you ask? Well, I think I’ll judge by three criteria and give marks out of 10 for each:

1 – Culinary integrity (good-ness, perhaps): is the cereal actually good, high quality food.
2 – Fun-ness: a corn flake may taste nice, but it’s not fun. If something tastes nasty, it’s not fun either. But, some things are fun to eat despite clearly having low culinary integrity. This is what we’re measuring here.
3 – Bonkers American-ness. This is the intangible “they’d only even think of this in America” quotient. We know that in the end some will sneak over the Atlantic, but you know where it’s been invented.

If I was judging the Dorset Cereals Tasty, Toasted Spelt, Barley and Oat Flakes muesli by these criteria, the markings would be as follows:

Culinary Integrity: 8 – As I said above, it’s actually good. Nice depth of flavour, nice textures, proper ingredients. Yes. Good.

Fun-ness: 3 – It’s good to eat, but it’s really very worthy. It’s still something trying mostly to be healthy, not trying to be a joyous party of nonsense in the mouth. I think it’s about as fun as muesli will ever get, but that’s still not very fun

Bonkers American-ness: 0 – It’s deeply un-American. It’s British and Swiss, it’s serious and dour, even the packet colour is muted and unsaturated. No points for madness at all. I might even mark it down more, if I had the chance, for the excess of adjectives in the name.


Given that America is the great disposable culture, at least if something is really, really nasty I can throw it in the bin without a feeling of guilt, and move on to the next. I shall have no puritanical streak demanding that I finish each packet before moving on to the next.

So here goes. Into the great American adventure. A wild west of artificial colours and sugars. We venture into land of promise and plenty.