It’s no secret that cold cereal was invented to help nineteenth-century Victorians stifle their rampant sexual desires. Any breakfast historian can tell you that. Sylvester Graham (1794–1851), a so-called “philosopher and nutrition crusader,” was the kind of forward-thinking wackmobile who saw an indisputable connection between a person’s decadence and their eating habits; this was partially augmented by his perception that the medical profession was wicked. “Disease is never the legitimate result of the normal operations of any of our organs,” he wrote, a sentiment that would eventually spawn the creation of Quisp.
Mr. Graham suspected that bad food and inappropriate sexual desires—particularly masturbation—were the true cause of every major illness. This made the cure for all sickness relatively simple: sexual moderation (i.e., less than thirteen orgasms a year for married couples, which actually seems reasonable), daily exercise, and a proper diet.
By 1840, Graham’s career was in shambles; this does not seem altogether surprising, considering he was insane. However, his well-argued insanity influenced a New Yorker named James Caleb Jackson, and Jackson embraced Graham’s philosophy on his way toward creating a bad-tasting wafer out of graham flour and water. He called his food “Granula” (a precursor to Granola). Jackson was force-feeding his wretched Granula in his Dansville, New York, sanitarium when it was discovered by Ellen Harmon White, a Seventh-Day Adventist. She adopted the idea and started her own sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan, in 1866. In need of a staff doctor, White hired a scrappy young physician named John Harvey Kellogg. John hired his brother, William, as clerk of the institute.
John Kellogg was also a disciple of the Graham philosophy and agreed that a flavorless, grain-based food was precisely what America needed. By 1902, he had conjured a way to produce flake cereal—the ideal medium for a crunchy, soulless pabulum. He tried to make wheat flakes, but the technology for such a innovation did not yet exist. Corn flakes, however, worked swimmingly.
Initially developed for scientific purposes, corn flakes struck the brothers Kellogg as a savvy business opportunity. This crispy treat seemed perfect for a society assumedly filled with oversexed, disease-ridden lunatics. And while selling cereal made money, it also raised ethical dilemmas: The angelic White was devastated that the Kelloggs were making money from a food designed to improve human purity. Meanwhile, John Kellogg was upset that his brother added sugar to the flake recipe to improve sales, a supplement he believed would liberate the public libido and turn every corn flake aficionado into a raging sexaholic. The Kellogg brothers eventually sued one another. After winning the lawsuit, William Kellogg took control of the enterprise; his puritan brother remained a stockholder.
Years later, a trio of Rastafarian elves would promote puffed rice.
Today, few members of the scientific community see a close connection between cold cereal and sex, although advertisers still did in the 1950s. Early Corn Flakes commercials showed Superman eating cereal with Jimmy Olsen, but never with Lois Lane; this was to keep viewers from inferring that Superman and Lois Lane had spent the night together (evidently, the notion of Superman and Jimmy Olsen having a homosexual relationship was not a concern). However, sex is not the central theme to modern cereal advertising. In fact, selling cereal is not the central theme to cereal advertising. Saturday morning commercials for all the best cereals are teaching kids how to figure out what’s cool. They’re the first step in the indoctrination of future hipsters: Cereal commercials teach us that anything desirable is supposed to be exclusionary.
An inordinate number of cereal commercials are based on the premise that a given cereal is so delicious that a fictional creature would want to steal it. We are presented with this scenario time and time again. The most obvious is the Trix Rabbit, a tragic figure whose doomed existence is not unlike that of Sisyphus. Since the cereal’s inception, the rabbit—often marginalized as “silly”—has never been allowed to enjoy even one bowl of his favorite foodstuff, and the explanation for this embargo smacks of both age discrimination and racism (we are to accept that Trix is reserved exclusively “for kids”).[45]
An even sadder illustration of cereal segregation is Sonny the Cuckoo Bird, arguably the most tortured member of the advertising community. Sonny is plagued with self-loathing; though outspokenly otaku for Cocoa Puffs, he doesn’t feel he deserves to consume them. Sonny will do anything to escape from his jones, including (but not limited to) locking himself into a primitive skycycle and shooting himself into outer space. To make matters worse, he is bombarded by temptation: Random children endlessly taunt him with heaping bowls of C-Puffs, almost like street junkies waving heroin needles in the face of William S. Burroughs. The kids have cereal, and Sonny does not. Translation: The kids are cool, and Sonny’s an extremist and a failure. And as long as they possess what he does not, Sonny shall remain a second-class phoenix, doomed by his own maniacal ambition for breakfast.
Commercials for Lucky Charms star a leprechaun who replaced the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow with a bowl of marshmallow-laden cereal, a narrative device that slightly overstated the value of the actual product. The Cookie Crisp[46] mascot was a masked rapscallion named “Crook,” whose whole self-identity was built on stealing cereal. In ads for both Cocoa and Fruity Pebbles, Barney Rubble went to ridiculous lengths in the hope of shoplifting Fred Flintstone’s breakfast, occasionally dressing like a woman and/or rapping like Ghostface Killah. Time and time again, commercials for cereal assault children with the same theme: A product’s exclusivity is directly proportional to its social cachet, which is the definition of calculated adult coolness.
When I say calculated adult coolness, I’m referring to the kind of coolness that generally applies to people between the ages of nineteen and thirty-six. This is different than mainstream teen coolness and aging hipster default coolness, both of which reflect an opposing (and sort of pathetic) consumer aesthetic. Cereal ads are directed at kids, but they barely work on young people; the kind of advertising that works on a teenager are bandwagon spots for things like Trident and khaki Gap pants. Those ads imply that these are products everybody else already owns. Teenagers claim they want to be cool, but they mostly just want to avoid being uncool. It’s the same for aging hipsters, an equally terrified class of Americans who slowly conclude that the key to staying relevant is by exhibiting default appreciation for the most obvious youth culture entities; this is why you often hear forty-seven-year-old men with ponytails saying things like, “Oh, I’m totally into the new stuff. That new Nickelback record is just terrific.” Aging hipsters and corduroy-clad high school sophomores are both primarily concerned with dodging lameness. However, there is a stretch in everyone’s early adulthood where they can choose (or choose against) creating their own personalized version of nonpopulist cool, which may (or may not) succeed. This is accomplished by embracing semioriginal, semielitist cultural artifacts that remain just out of reach to those who desire them—the so-called “Cocoa Puffs of Power.”
We all relate to Sonny the Cuckoo Bird. We pursue that which retreats from us, and coolness is always a bear market. Coolness is always what others seem to have naturally—an unspecific, delicious, chocolately paradigm we must pilfer through subterfuge. It drives us, for lack of a better term, coo coo. And part of the reason we struggle is because there is no hard-and-fast clarity about what qualifies anything as cool. It needs to be original, but only semioriginal: It would be legitimately inventive (and kind of “out there”) to casually walk around with the petrified skull of a orangutan under your arm for no obvious reason, but this would only seem cool to a select class of performance artist. A better choice would be a T-shirt featuring the cast of After M*A*S*H. A cool image also needs to be semielitist, but it can’t be wholly elitist: What you display should be extremely hard to find, yet could have been theoretically found by absolutely anyone six months ago (had they possessed the foresight). This is why calculated adult coolness would reward the possession of, say, a can of Elf soda pop, yet frown upon the possession of, say, four ounces of weapons-grade uranium.[47]
The impact of this understanding comes later in life, usually at college, and usually around the point when being “weird” starts to be periodically interpreted by others as “charming” and/or “sexually intriguing.” As noted earlier, kids don’t really understand the nuance of cereal advertising until they reach their twenties; this is when characters like the Trix Rabbit evolve into understated Christ figures. And though the plot is not purposeful on the behalf of cereal makers, it’s also not accidental. Cereal mascots are generally associated with sugared cereals—while a box of Wheaties might feature anyone from Bruce Jenner to Michelle Kwan, Count Chocula sticks with its mischievous vampire. Super Golden Crisp sells itself with the portrait of a laid-back bear wearing a mock turtleneck; Grape Nuts sells itself with a photograph of Grape Nuts. And this is more proof of cereal’s overlooked relationship to American cool: Being cool is mostly ridiculous, and so is sugared cereal. That’s why we like it.
I eat sugared cereal almost exclusively. This is because I’m the opposite of a “no-nonsense” guy. I’m an “all-nonsense” guy. Every time I drive a long distance, I’m hounded by the fear that I will get a flat tire and be unable to change it. When a button falls off one of my dress shirts, I immediately throw away the entire garment and buy a new one. I can’t swim; to me, twelve feet of water is no different than twelve feet of hydrochloric acid (it will kill me just as dead). However, I can stay awake for seventy-two straight hours. I can immediately memorize phone numbers without writing them down. When flipping channels during commercial breaks in televised sporting events, I can innately sense the perfect moment to return to what I was watching originally. So the rub is that I have these semicritical flaws and I have these weirdly specific gifts, and it seems like most Americans are similarly polarized by what they can (and cannot) do. There are no-nonsense people, and there are nonsense people. And it’s been my experience that nonsense people tend to consume Cocoa Krispies and Lucky Charms and Cap’n Crunch ( “nonsense food,” if you will). Consequently, we nonsense types spend hours and hours staring at cardboard creatures like the Trix Rabbit and absorbing his ethos, slowly ingesting the principles of exclusionary coolness while rapidly ingesting sugar-saturated spoonfuls of Vitamin B-12.
The desire to be cool is—ultimately—the desire to be rescued. It’s the desire to be pulled from the unwashed masses of society. It’s the desire to be advanced beyond the faceless humanoid robots who will die unheralded deaths and never truly matter, mostly because they all lived the same pedestrian life. Without the spoils of exclusionary coolness, we’re just cogs in the struggle. We’re like a little kid trying to kayak (or perhaps freestyle rock climb), and all the older kids keep mocking our efforts, openly implying that we cannot compete. But if we can just find that one cool thing that nobody else has—that gregarious, nine-foot animated jungle cat who can provide a glimmer of hope and a balanced breakfast—we can be better than ourselves. We can be tigers. ’Atta boy.
1. Proof that America is ultimately a sympathetic nation surfaced in 1976, when a consumer election sponsored by General Mills indicated that over 99 percent of Trix eaters felt the flamboyant six-foot rabbit deserved a bowl of Trix, which places his approval rating on par with Colin Powell in 1996.
2. This is not to be confused with the short-lived Oatmeal Cookie Crisp, a cereal fronted by the good-natured wizard “Cookie Jarvis.”
3. Although this would make you very cool in Syria.