Sugary Cereal Is Sweet Rebellion
There’s nothing quite like a bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch at 4:00am. It’s amazing. CTC, as they call it in the biz, was approximately 67% responsible for helping me to endure my freshman and sophmore years of college, as the cafeteria in my dorm was only able to produce food that could be categorized as tasting like varying degrees of Bland, Gross, Parched Chicken, Grill, or some amalgam of those options. Up until college, i’d never partaken of what I referred to as “sugary cereals” and what you may know as simply “cereal.”
We weren’t tree huggers by any means, but my childhood pantry was full of such classics as Cheerios, Raisin Brand, Kix, and, less notably to a child, Total, Product 19, Special K, and Shredded Wheat. The Blankenship family loved its health. Hippies.
Thus, like any adolescent sheltered from the world’s temptations, my first college solo trip to the grocery store was the epitome of teenage wasteland. It was like I had dated a homely, boring, unremarkable girl for years and, while I had seen the benefit of such a relationship due to my desire for female companionship, no one had told me that there were also beautiful women who painted and played music and loved thrift stores and foreign films and red meat and still smelled nice (hypothetically… there are women like this… right?) Row after row of sugary goodness… Cookie Crisp, Lucky Charms, Golden Grahams, and the aforementioned CTC all made it into my cart (alongside college classics like brownie mix and cheap microwave pizzas) and I felt sinful and shamed for my actions, yet strangely drawn into them with no hope of staying the need for sucrose satisfaction. My love affair with cereal continues unabated even now.
Favorite cereals… comment section. Go.