Sep 23, 2022 3 min read

Cocoa Puffs helped make a good reader.

That was part of all our childhoods, wasn’t it? Back before our mothers realized that most cereal was nothing more than a bowlful of cookies, we broke our fasts each morning spooning crunchy sugar into our mouths while perusing the backs of the cereal boxes. What better way to start the day than to shovel-and-crunch while getting caught up on the doings of Sonny the Cuckoo bird.

Winter mornings at our house we ate Cream of Wheat or Coco Wheats, yuck; the rest of the year it was Cocoa Puffs. By my twenties I graduated to Cap’n Crunch. (That stuff will scrape the skin off the roof of your mouth.) In my forties I downshifted to Wheaties before giving up on breakfast cereal altogether.

All those carbs so early in the day now would do something to my blood sugar that would cause me to launch myself into the fridge by 10 a.m. I haven’t had cereal for breakfast in years, and I miss the crunch, and maybe the boxes, too.

“Newsy boxes,” said my friend when we were talking about this. The back of the box was where all the drama and character development lived – enough to keep you entertained during the first bowl. By the time you got to the bottom of the bowl and started adding more cereal to use up the sugary milk, you were reading the sides of the box, where the ingredients were listed. I’m guessing many a chemical engineer – or nutritionist – got her start that way.

“Loved cereal,” my friend said. “But not milk.”

Turns out this friend of mine ate his morning cereal dry, without milk or any other liquid. In a bowl. With a spoon.

“How did you not choke to death?” I asked, picturing him doing the shovel-and-read without the milk to slide things down. It’s one thing to eat handfuls of dry Cap’n Crunch or Froot Loops out of the box while standing in the kitchen at midnight. It’s another to sit before a bowl of the dry cereal, on purpose, and eat it with a utensil, like plowing through a sand dune.

“Cheerios?” I asked.

“Dusty,” he said. “And possibly flammable, like dust in a grain silo.”

“Frosted Flakes?”

“Like shredded paper.”

“Grape-Nuts?” I asked.

“A gravel driveway,” he said.

Extending the metaphor, I likened his breakfast habit to reading the manual that comes with a new computer. Dry, dry, dry. And I’ll bet the cereal boxes aren’t as juicy these days, either. At some point, we all must graduate from breakfast cereal to yogurt or avocado toast, and from cereal boxes to books.

I’m glad I don’t eat cereal anymore. Shrinkflation has made the boxes so skinny now, and still they are expensive. When my kids were pre-teenagers, they could eat a half a box at one sitting, sometimes out of a mixing bowl. If I were raising children now, I’d be buying those off-brand cereals that come in the big plastic bags. I’d be saving money, but the cereal might not taste as good.

And there wouldn’t be anything to read.