Читать книгу Chili Dawgs Always Bark at Night - Lewis Grizzard - Страница 29

A Grain of Truth in Straight Talk About Cereal

Let’s have some straight talk about cereal. Cereal used to be simple. Your mother put Rice Krispies or Grape-Nuts Flakes on the breakfast table with milk.

You dutifully filled your bowl with each and ate, because that is the way we did things back when children still respected their parents and boys didn’t wear earrings and nice girls didn’t even kiss on the first date and “going all the way” meant a trip to the state capital.

I never stopped to ask, “Why am I eating this cereal?”

As a matter of fact, I never stopped to ask much of anything in those days. It was against the rules to be too inquisitive, although I did wonder to myself, “What does Ozzie Nelson do for a living?”

I probably saw every episode of The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, and I don’t remember Ozzie ever going to work. He probably sat around the house eating Rice Krispies all day, for all I know.

I stopped eating cereal after I left home. I was tired of it. Same old Rice Krispies. Same old “Snap, crackle and pop,” which ceased to be amusing after I turned four. I figured I’d eaten all the cereal I’d ever have to eat.

But after being off cereal for a number of years, something happened. What happened was the word “fiber.”

It’s a simple little five-letter word that once was used almost exclusively in regard to the textile industry.

But no more.

First there was Euell Gibbons out there in the woods eating berries and nuts and God knows what else, and then came John Denver munching down cereal out in the Rocky Mountains someplace, telling us how important it is we get our daily dose of fiber, which means whatever it is in cereal that allegedly makes one’s bowels move regularly.

You don’t eat cereal, goes the message, your bowels don’t move regularly and you die of about thirty-seven different types of cancer.

That’s been hammered in my head so strongly that if I miss a single day without cereal, I call my attorney to make sure my will is in order.

But it’s not easy to pick a cereal anymore. Television is filled with commercials boasting the fiber content of dozens of cereals.

And the new cereals don’t have names like the cereals I ate as a kid: Rice Krispies, Sugar Pops, Frosted Flakes, Cheerios. Harmless little names.

Today, we are urged to eat cereals with names like Nutra-Grain. Isn’t that something they feed to cows out in Nebraska?