Breakfast À La Carton

IN SOME households breakfast is served anonymously, the individual bowls being filled in the kitchen, for there are women who feel that the presence of the identifying box on the table strikes a jarring commercial note. But as I hate to have cereal and cream come out uneven, I have always preferred to serve myself from the original container. Besides, reading the blurbs somehow makes the stuff more palatable.

At least, it used to. As a constant reader of cereal packages every morning for more than forty years, I am depressed by the crassly materialistic turn which this form of literature has taken lately. There is still plenty of lush verbiage. But the adjectives “healthful,” “nutritious,” and “body-building,” which used to whet my youthful appetite, have given way to such impersonal exclamations as “wonderful” and “amazing.” And they don’t refer to the contents of the package, but to some rackety gadget that can be obtained by a barter of box tops.

I can remember when Post Toasties were known as Elijah’s Manna. The box was decorated with a likeness of the old gentleman being fed by ravens, and there was no object in tearing off the top except to get at the flakes inside. The first Grape-Nuts I ate came in a bleak yellow and black box with a booklet entitled “The Road to Wellville.” They seemed to take an unconscionably long time to chew, but they were sufficient unto themselves and I munched them manfully. Then there was Force, to which Sunny Jim lured me with limericks, although the package itself offered nothing livelier than a couple of grim blacksmiths hammering an anvil.

The breakfast food approach has changed since those days. Consider what has happened to the old Quaker. I can still recall him as a dignified figure on the oatmeal package, holding another oatmeal package bearing the picture of a smaller Quaker holding a smaller oatmeal package, and so on ad minimum. When puffed wheat — “the food shot from guns” — came along, the gentle old Quaker was suddenly surrounded by belching cannon, but he stood his ground philosophically. Now, however, he appears to be going down for the third time under the bombardment. Only his head and shoulders are visible. His smile is forgiving, but forced. A Disney character named Bugs Bunny has taken over, with an offer of five 160-page comic books for 15 cents plus a box top.

The other morning, after several readings of the Cheerios package, which offers a Lone Ranger Deputy badge and a flashlight ring, I began to wonder if perhaps I might be living on borrowed time. Fond as I am of uncooked cereals, I don’t like to feel like a case of arrested development every time I eat them. Somewhere, I told myself, there must be an adult cereal — a breakfast food that can be eaten with dignity, free from the tearing of box tops, and the popping of disintegrator pistols, and the taint of bribery.

So the next time I went to the grocer’s, it was with the determination to track down a cereal suited to my years. The clerk was most coöperative; wielding a long-handled grappling iron, he brought down package after package from the upper shelves, and in rapid succession I rejected Pep (turbojet planes), Kellogg’s Corn Flakes (sun visors), Kix (cut-out animals), Muffets (spinning tops and ball-point pens), Wheaties (miniature cameras), and half a dozen others. Even Shredded Wheat, though outwardly as sedate as ever with Niagara Falls at either end, proved to be full of cardboard jet planes and rockets. In fact, in a survey of the entire stock of cereals, I found only one package that seems worthy of a place on a grownup’s table: Nabisco 100% Bran, which contains “approximately 10% non-nutritive finely milled crude fibre . . . for constipation due to insufficient bulk.” I guess that puts me in my proper age-bracket.