Ode to Oats

It may shock you to find that I sometimes jot down ideas in my pretentious personal notebook regarding what I am going to blog about. This isn’t so much a strategy of ensuring that I have quality topics to write about – the proof is in the pudding on that one – but rather a strategy to remind me to write about random things that occur to me while I am otherwise occupied. (Hint: most of my best ideas come to me while I am driving with the radio off; screw showering, my brain works best under stress not relaxation.)

So this morning when I flung open my notebook to check something and saw, scrawled along the right-hand page the words, “blog = cereal, ode to” and I remembered how earlier this week while writing about something completely removed I found myself drifting towards a discussion of cereal. This discussion, which I had to rein in for the sake of sanity/continuity in my other piece, left me feeling so elated that I absolutely knew that I would get a wonderful kick out of writing a blog about it. Unfortunately, that feeling of grain-based bliss is long gone. And I even just had a bowl of Trader Joe’s cereal, sweet and crunchy with a few of those misshapen brown O’s clinging to the side of the bowl, but I feel indifferent to the meal.

I must chalk this indifference up to being in a bad mood, because there is no one in my youthful age bracket that feels indifference towards cereal. Young people love cereal. It is all of the best parts of eating without any of the preparation, and in a circumstance when you can’t muster even the minimalist preparation, it is still delicious dry. Cereal is the best of both worlds – it is chips plus sugar and ice cream with crunch.

In my life I have loved different cereals for different reasons. I loved Rice Crispies because it was so much fun to upend my mother’s heavy grey sugar-mill over the bowl, zigzagging madly and leaving a puddle of milk and soggy sugar in the bowl when I was done. I loved Fruity Pebbles purely for the taste and the texture, and the way that they conformed excellently when eaten from a mug. When I was in college I briefly loved Honey Bunches of Oats; the tall, slim boxes would lay fallow in my assigned cupboards, the bags open and the weird grains getting stale and sweeter by the day. In my last days of college I loved pouring a bowl of Raisin Bran and letting it sog up for a few minutes before eating it.

There is another reason, beyond nostalgia, taste and texture that I love cereal. I love cereal because it is such a universal topic for discussion in the 18-28 age bracket. In classrooms and bus stops all around the world young people are breaking the ice by mentioning how much they are looking forward to their bowl of cereal. And other people are responding, remarking on what they want for lunch, naming their favorite cereal and recounting the harrow tale of the time that they ate 4 bowls of Cookie Crisp (still around?).

I once had a 15 minute conversation with a complete stranger in a supermarket about Cinnamon Toast Crunch – so delicious if you can manage to eat it within the first 3 minutes of pouring it.