The Healthfulness of Cereal Packets

Less You

Peanut butter continues to pervade American cuisine. You might have noticed that I’m already on my third different peanut butter cereal here. There’s peanut butter in many of the sugary chocolate treats. The PB&J is the standard food for parents who can’t work out what to serve. And really, it’s a very, very good choice: I believe that you can get all the nutrients you need to survive if you eat enough PB&J sandwiches. Although I am also told that you can also get your daily recommended amounts of every vitamin, mineral, carb, liquid, salt, and so on, from 19 pints of Guinness and one glass of orange juice.  So perhaps being able to get all the nutrients you require shouldn’t be your sole criteria on what to serve.

I am complaining again about different specious health claims today, also peanut butter related. Today I’m writing about Peanut Butter Cheerios. And, I will be honest, I haven’t much to say about them. This is in part because Beth ate most of the pack whilst I was eating other cereals. It is also because they’re pretty unremarkable.

They’re like Cheerios, with a little bit of peanut butter flavour. That is it. There’s not enough peanut butteryness. But they’re not nasty. There’s nothing actually wrong, but also nothing in the least bit exciting. I’m hoping that perhaps some others in the incredibly varied Cheerios line – at last count I saw something like 10 different varieties of Cheerios on the shelves – will turn out better.

One thing that we did discover they were good for was mixing in to other things. Into fruit salad or yoghurt to give a bit of texture, without being overwhelmingly sweet, or offensive, like other cereals are. But that’s damning with faint praise: I should be judging them as a breakfast cereal and, whilst not failing the test, they aren’t bringing any great excitement to the party.

Less Peanut Butter

On to my specious healthfulness whinge. I notice on the pack that we have a claim: “More Grains. Less You.” Is there any plausible explanation for how more grains makes you lose weight? Do you drop the pounds by eating corn and wheat? Or is it the whole-grain-ness? Perhaps fiber makes you shit more, but surely that isn’t a sustainable method of losing weight.

Sure, fiber’s good for you.  I wouldn’t dispute that. But there’s a very big difference between healthy and slimming.

It seems to be part of the classic stylings of the cereal packet: to make claims that are sufficiently vague that you can’t quite pin them down for being misleading, but which if you examine them in any detail at all, even in their vaguest form they seem to be utter nonsense.

It turns out that Cheerios (as I guess most people in the US know) have decided to work hard at their vagueness. In the past they’ve been told by the pharmaceutical regulation body to change the wording on their packets. They had claimed that Cheerios helped reduce cholesterol. And that meant they were marketing themselves as a drug. And that meant they had to undergo far, far stricter tests  and guidelines than just being something people eat.

Cheerios, unsurprisingly, walked back from that precipice very quickly and have toned their language down to much more unproveable claims.

Boringcomb

Excellent source of boredom

A couple of weeks ago we left Palm Springs after staying there for a month and a half. We really enjoyed our time in the desert, with the fantastic San Jacinto mountains looming 10,000 feet over our heads, the almost omnipresent beautiful weather, the stunning cactus and desert scenery, the golf and some beautiful modernist architecture in a ton of residential homes.

From that, you’d think that I loved Palm Springs. But that would be a slight misapprehension. Greater Palm Springs is an area that has nearly half a million residents. Palm Springs, the town, has a mere 40,000 or so. And whilst we enjoyed being in Palm Springs city, and whilst we loved being in the desert, the greater metropolitan area is dreary.

It holds so much promise: 125 golf courses (but they all look the same, have nothing to do with the desert, and cost a fortune). The newer, shinier, more recently built houses – but if you thought they’d carry on with the cool modernist aesthetic, you’d be mistaken; instead they’ve just plonked down McMansions or miserable retirement communities on the golf courses without the slightest thought for how it might look. There are a ton of restaurants, except they’re all chains, or bad steak houses. It’s just a whole lot of nothing. There’s no “there” there.

Which brings me, as a tenuous link, to Post’s Honeycomb. Kerry visited us in Palm Springs and generously bought a couple of packs of cereal for me. This is the first, and I was excited. You’d think an American breaksfast cereal called “honeycomb” would be awesome: sweet, crunchy and wonderful. Perhaps like a delightfully bad-taste version of a Crunchy.

Sadly not. It is the cereal equivalent of greater Palm Springs. It is deeply underwhelming. It has no character. No excitement.

A bowl of Meh

The cereal itself is hugely puffed up, and massively inflated (the only cereal so far where a portion is a cup and a half, because so much of it is air). It’s shaped more like cartoon snowflake than honeycomb. This gigantism is actually really annoying, as it’s hard to shovel it into the mouth fast enough. And you get very little of any note with any bite.

The texture is OKish, but no better. It’s crunchy, which is good. But it’s not that nice, biting crunch. It’s a bit soft and airy. It’s not quite like eating Styrofoam peanuts, but it’s not far off. If you go halfway between a Styrofoam peanut and some stale toast, you’re probably on the right tracks.

The flavour too is sort of OK. But that’s as good as I could say. It wasn’t offensive, but it was very mild. Although there was honey, there wasn’t very much of it. Although there was cereal, there wasn’t much. Mostly there was little flavour at all, and at the base it was that bland, cardboard taste that seems to be the root of some of the worst cereals here.

As I mentioned already, it’s the cereal equivalent of Rancho Mirage or Indian Wells. You think it all sounds good, the component parts all look great,  but it is so much less than the sum of its parts, just leaving you bored and disappointed.

The Golden Years

Box of Golden Grahams

Long ago, back in the 1970s and 80s at the fag end of the cold war, Britain was covered in US Air Force bases. Full of F14s and B52s and Tomahawk missiles holding the second line against the coming Soviet invasion, able to strike back once the tanks started rolling into Germany. It was a strange era. Every time we heard the F111s flying out of Upper Heyford we thought the nuclear Armageddon had started.

As well as containing the tools of the imminent demise of mankind, these places also contained shops. Shops stocked with all the obscure US products that you couldn’t find in the UK; and not only that, they were highly subsidised.  It was rare to find an opportunity to get inside a base, except when there were airshows, and then access was restricted. But every so often we managed. To  us, as a family, where we had spent some time in the US in my extreme youth (and my parents had spent longer before I was born), it was a treasure trove of incredible excitements such as grape soda and Budweiser. It’s bewildering to think that I was actually delighted to find these things. The world was much less global back then.

Amongst the things we tended to buy, on those rare but happy visits to the USAF’s shops, were Golden Grahams. I have no recollection whether my parents discovered these in California in the 60s, or much later on future trips to the US, but I do recall them occasionally making it into our cereal cupboard and being a rare and much loved treat.

So how would they fare when I came back to them so much later? A lot of things I loved as a kid are the kind of thing that you might love as a kid but which are actually pretty nasty to an adult palate. The Golden Graham’s pass the adult palate test pretty well.

Nostalgia for Upper Heyford

I’m sure they’re entirely familiar to my US readers, but UK readers are probably not so familiar. Graham crackers are, well, a cracker made out of wheat. Not too strong in flavour, but quite earthy and a little sweet. They’re the basis for the legendary smores that we often hear of in the UK, and in that regard perhaps the closest analogy would be a digestive biscuit. Certainly in terms of ubiquity.

As a cereal they’ve used Graham cracker material and made it into a Shreddies like lattice. The “golden” part of the name is a honey addition.  It’s not the usual lightweight honey you often get in cereal but a darker, almost burnt sort of flavour, bordering on being caramelised. The cereal is like an unmalted Shreddies, I guess the caramelised honey replacing the malt.  And it’s great. It’s really, really good.

It’s a dense cereal, one that sinks, that’s filling, that tastes good. It tastes like it’s made from real stuff, not from the magical chemicals in a lot of US cereal. It actually sets you up nicely for the new day.

There’s something earthy here in the graham cracker which works fantastically with the burnt honey, giving a great full flavour and just a hugely satisfying feeling when eating it. I can see entirely why we used to be so excited when we found them.

Frankly delicious, and something I’ll be revisiting once I’ve emptied the rest of the cereal aisle.