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)