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