Cereals

If you're like me (oh boy, and consider yourself lucky for several reasons if you are!), you've got your normal grocery store route charted, with nearly every shopping cart stop plotted. I know what I like, and I know what works for me. An occasional detour for something new to spice things up, sure, but not often.

I think we sort of figure out early in life what our taste receptors customarily dig and find repulsive. Marketers and "new product developers" know this. They know we're slow to venture out on completely foreign taste bud excursions. They also know what food items are familiar and comfortable to us by culture. And with these key generalizations in pocket, they tweak and dabble and spin off what has already been consumer-approved. Think of it as song remixes as opposed to previously unreleased compositions.

Look no further than the cereal aisle for a wide range of examples. This sucker used to be a section comprised of a handful of choices. Then that section expanded to a whole aisle. Then that aisle expanded to the opposite side of the aisle. It's now just a hallway of pretty, colored, rectangular boxes on display. Thing is, Kellogg's and Post and General Mills and all the brains behind the discipline of cereal creation have hit a wall. Nothing in these aisles is new. Everything's a repackaged, reshaped, re-colored twist on what already exists. I wonder if they think we haven't caught on yet.

Every children's movie, cartoon, and pre-teen fad comes out with its own cereal. But what is the cereal? The same darn thing sitting three boxes away, except this one has ghost shapes instead of clovers. Or vanilla clusters instead of cinnamon clusters. Or dehydrated blueberries instead of dehydrated bananas. Or purple, dried marshmallows instead of green ones with a yellow star in the center.

Or it's covered in chocolate. All foods eventually get the chocolate-covered makeover. When your food product sales begin to decline, dunk it in chocolate and stamp "New!" in one of those exclamatory, zany talk bubbles on the package. This is a relatively fail-safe plan B. And plan C. You can never go wrong with chocolate.

...Scratch that -- ever had Chocolate Lucky Charms? Lord, it's like punishment. Feels like you got busted for cussing and have to stand in the bathroom with a bar of soap in your mouth. And not even soap with a delightful scent. I'm talking Lava soap, the kind that mechanics use to scour week-old engine grease off their fingers.

But you get the idea. The cereal aisle is full of repeats and Hollywood sequels. Alas, the well of morning gastronomic innovation has run dry for these cereal scientists in their cereal labs, adding and subtracting artificial flavors and red dyes to their beakers of rice, corn, and wheat. There are only so many times you can duplicate the core originals: Cheerios, Wheaties, Fruity Pebbles, Rice Krispies, Corn Flakes, Corn Pops, Honey Smacks, Honey Bunches of Oats, Chex, Trix, Lucky Charms, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, Cap'n Crunch, and Cookie Crisp.

The rest are dirty imposters. They should sit scuffed, dented, clearance-priced, and ashamed next to the Pop Tart rejects, like Frosted Strawberry Milkshake and Cherry with printed Pictionary clues. This is your Breakfast Hall of Shame.