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.