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.
