I Will Poop On Cereal

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I hate milk. Milk creeps me out. It always tastes sour. Even if it’s fresh. It always permeates an odor of funk. It’s white and watery, yet somehow coats your mouth so that your tongue must thrust its roof, repeatedly, to remove the taste.

Chocolate milk, however, is bearable. But only with equal portions milk and syrup and only if my mom makes it.

And you constantly have to smell it. It’s so high maintenance. So demanding of your time.ย  So not worth your time.

There are other, more loving ways, to get calcium. Blend a smoothie of yogurt and bananas. Let your lips around toasted, buttered bread and melted cheddar cheese. Even spinach and broccoli will do.

How does an ad campaign featuring glue on celebrities’ upper lips attract users?

And then there are those sugary grains. Sugary grains dumped in a bowl of udder excrement. Would you eat something resembling my friend’s son’s spit up?

What is cereal? Lumps of granola? Lumps of wheat? Lumps of purple U-shaped marshmallows? What are those weird, dried, colorful, fruit-like things? It can’t actually be fruit. Fruit is alive. Fruit ripens and then dies. Cereal lives forever in plastic and on deserted grocery store shelves.

The free toys cannot be worth the price of admission.

Weird magical characters that look like washed-up elves and drunk capt’ns and tricked-out rabbits endorse this product. And so does the letter K.

But the taste. It’s sugar and fakeness. It comes from a cardboard box. It’s not real. It’s made up. Like the cartoons. And OMG-eat this everyday for two weeks and you’ll look like Scar Jo.

Eating cereal takes so much time. So much effort. Such a commitment. You need milk (smell it first!). A clean bowl. A clean spoon. A box of weird clumps. Or is it clusters? What is the proportion? What has Ione Skye been in since Say Anything… And why did her father go to jail? What is so damn alluring about teen angst?

But eat quick. Or don’t. Because some like to eat it like the slop it is. Like Randy in A Christmas Story.

Options, people. Breakfast offers scrambled eggs, sunny-side up eggs, poached eggs. Even fake egg and yellow cheese on a Dunkin Donut croissant. Bagels.

Eat a bagel on the go. Eat a bagel while showering. Eat a bagel after puking in your office toilet. Cereal can’t cure a hangover. Cereal isn’t portable. Like I said, cereal is exacting. Burdensome. Effortful. (Yes, it is a word.)

Cereal is gross. Maybe that’s just me. Oh, and Cinnamon Toast Crunch, dry, eaten in handfuls, itsn’t totally torturous, but I was just a kid then.

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30 comments

  • jenn April 15, 2009  

    i love cereal, but i also love say anything.. so i’m torn on this post.

  • 80 Proof April 15, 2009  

    As someone who had a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios this morning, ended up with leftover milk in the bowl, then filled said bowl again with Rice Krispies…I disagree with this post.

    Cereal is my life. Cereal is harder to make than sunny side up or poached eggs???

  • belmontmedina April 15, 2009  

    After watching the episode of Food Detectives last night where they used a magnet to actually pull iron out of breakfast cereal, I’m pretty sure I will never have it for breakfast again. That being said, I did also make Rice Krispie Treats last night…

  • BS April 15, 2009  

    I love cereal – but it’s a snack. I don’t understand why breakfast was sacrificed to make way for cereal-as-a-meal. If I just have a bowl of cereal for bfast, I’m hungry an hour later. If you eat cereal for dinner or lunch, it’s considered pathetic, yet somehow it’s ok to just have cereal for bfast. y?

  • SAG April 15, 2009  

    gansie-Please don’t pretend like you didn’t devourer Cinnamon Toast Crunch as a kid.

  • gansie April 15, 2009  

    @SAG i hated every minute of it!

    bring on the cinnamon and s’mores pop tarts.

  • ML April 15, 2009  

    I haven’t been grocery shopping in two weeks and was forced to choose between a block of cheddar cheese or a bowl of kashi for breakfast this morning. I chose the kashi. Tastes like bird food.

  • Jeb April 15, 2009  

    Gansie…I am disappointed in you. Hating cereal is like hating dogs…it’s just wrong.

    And of course I agree with 80…there is nothing like eating a bowl of honey nut cheerios and then having enough milk left over to have a 2nd bowl of honey nut cheerios or something else.

  • lc April 15, 2009  

    I am ambivalent about cereal and rice krispie treats are OK but one day old they scrape up the roof of your mouth. What really urged me to comment was the link that brought me to this from Scar Jo:”We can all pledge to have healthy bodies no matter how diverse our lifestyles may be.” Can we, Scar Jo? For some reason, this annoys me intensely. More than scrapey cereal.

  • Nick April 15, 2009  

    I agree! I actually haven’t eaten cereal in years. I find it gross and way overpriced. Give me oatmeal, yogurt, or just fruit please.

    The only reason people like it is because they had it stuffed down their face hole for their entire lives.

    Granola isn’t bad. I can handle that. /rant.

  • Blake April 15, 2009  

    Given that I spent a solid ten years of my life refusing to eat anything except PB&J and Captain Crunch cereal (saving all the “berries” till the last bites), I have to say that without both milk and cereal, I would have probably died of starvation long ago.

    However, I would say that soy milk is one of the most god awful abominations mankind has ever conceived.

    Props for incorporating the word “poop”

  • Mrs. Joe Hoya April 15, 2009  

    I used to live on cereal as a kid and I mostly stay away from it now because of the high sugar content. However, I would totally tear up a box of Fruity Pebbles if it were placed in front of me.

    Does anyone else remember Ghostbusters cereal? Good times.

  • Alex April 15, 2009  

    I LOVE FROSTED MINI-WHEATS. And you can’t take that away from me, gansie.

    Cornflakes though…yuck.

  • Jrod April 15, 2009  

    My son’s spit-up resembles no cereal. Maybe the very end of a bowl of mini-wheats (sorry Alex) or perhaps grits (if that counts as cereal). And I stick by my Honey Nut Cheerios comment from FB. Great at any time of day.

  • JoeHoya April 15, 2009  

    I’m the kind of nerd who actually likes Cheerios and corn flakes.

    That being said, the major brands are RIDICULOUSLY expensive. If I’m going to go for cereal (which I do more and more infrequently), I’m buying the Trader Joe’s brand at half the price.

  • BS April 15, 2009  

    oh you have hit it on the nose, JoeHoya. Why is cereal so damn expensive?? I mean, it’s fine, but $5 a box? That is just madness.

  • 80 Proof April 15, 2009  

    As much as I hate to buy food not at local places, cereal at Target is so much cheaper. $5 for a HUGE box. Like twice the size of the $5 boxes from the bodegas.

    Alex, totally going to buy Frosted Mini Wheats now, haven’t had those in years.

    Anyone else mix two cereals at the same time?

  • Tia April 15, 2009  

    Mrs. Joe Hoya

    Ooh! I remember Ghostbusters cereal! I also remember Count Chocula and Boo Berries which are the only cereals I would willingly and happily eat (if they were still around).

  • TVFF April 15, 2009  

    How can anyone not like the greatest cereal ever, Colon Blow?

    http://www.hulu.com/watch/10304/saturday-night-live-colon-blow

  • Alex L April 16, 2009  

    “I hate milk. Milk creeps me out. It always tastes sour. Even if itโ€™s fresh. It always permeates an odor of funk. Itโ€™s white and watery, yet somehow coats your mouth so that your tongue must thrust its roof, repeatedly, to remove the taste.”

    So, my sister and I were born here in America, and grew up eating lots of cereal and drinking obscene amounts of milk. (If I had discovered Life cereal when I was a child, this no doubt would have doubled my cereal intake.)

    My father (an immigrant) commented that, along with most American kids, my sister and I smelled a little funny–that, because of our high-dairy diets, there was an ever-present and very faint odor of sour milk about our persons.

    A psychoanalyst would probably say this is the moment where I started becoming lactose intolerant.

    (PS- Love the blog, keep it up.)

  • westcoast April 16, 2009  

    So I don’t really eat cereal any more (prefer pumpkin granola from TPSS Co-Op), but I can tell you with absolute certainty that Fruity Pebbles on tangy fro-yo is delicious. I never ate Fruity Pebbles as a child (my parents only allowed Raisin Bran or Rice Crispies), but they go incredibly well with Mr. Yogato down the street (as well as Pinkberry in Cali). My current favorite thing to do for dinner (I know this is even weirder than having cereal for breakfast) is to get a large tangy fro-yo with Fruity Pebs and blueberrys with a lid. Stick her in the freezer for an hour (this doesn’t affect the consistency of the yogurt at all). Then you have frozen blueberries going on with all of the other yumminess. You won’t be disappointed.

  • westcoast April 16, 2009  

    that was meant to read “(I know this is even weirder than cereal for *dinner*)”

  • dad gansie April 22, 2009  

    a lot of comments….cereal is good..almost all winter i make quick oats with milk and water with a bananna or apple
    or if out of that i’d put in cherrios also love raisin bran crunch can’t really remember goshbusters too clearly
    toys have been long time out of my C.
    gansie, i remember you did like mom’s stirred chock milk instead of my shaken. i bet that’s how you like your martinni’s too
    enjoy the warm forecasted weather this weekend

  • Pingback: Burritos: Now and Later | Macheesmo May 2, 2009  
  • Sara May 2, 2009  

    Haha, I totally agree. Cereal stinks and milk is so disgusting. If even the smallest droplet somehow gets on my skin while pouring I immediately have to wash it off – the smell of dried milk is vomit inducing. You wanna hear something really gross – my boyfriends mother will drink a glass of milk at dinner, with a steak. It is hard to watch.

  • Watch Me Eat July 12, 2009  

    Thanks for the link! I really appreciate the “this person is dumb” alt tag…

  • ur a crazy cat, i only read the top few lines where u were bitchin about milk alot, milks not demanding of ur time ur silly and milk and cookies is the best thing on the god forsaken planet, other than reeses twix and alotta other declious shit

  • wow u are mean.cereal rocks and wtf milk helps people grow TO U WANT US ALL TO FUCKEN DIE!!!!!! That my friend is freaken ridiculous stop being such a diva i bet u think ur so kewl dissing cereal but when the leprechan from lucky charms,the rabit from trix,bam bam from fuity pebbles, the bee from cheerios,and the wolf from cookie crisp find out you’ve been dissing them and complaining they ill form a stronger alliance then the nazis or the soviet union and kick ur cereal dissingg milk hateing diva ass!!!!

    Have a nice day ๐Ÿ˜€

    I’m gunna do a quick rant : You are a ceral hateing jerk!!!

    ok byeee ๐Ÿ˜€

  • erica April 5, 2010  

    god, gansie. how can you be so mean to people who subside on cereal alone. can’t you see that it’s integral to the diets of irate people who can’t spell or read (nutritional information or studies on the effect of excess phosphorus on bones)? i’m so offended.

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