Cereal Killer

When I was around ten, my family went on a trip to Italy. Walking through one of many town squares eating one of many gelatos, my mother pointed toward a fountain, at another family eating gelato. She leaned down and whispered in my ear, “Where do you think they’re from?” Then she said something that has stuck with me. “Look at their shoes.”

My mother was right. You can tell a lot about people from examining their footwear. Russian ladies enjoy bejeweled sandals. The French prefer a simple ballet flat. Chinese men have been wearing the equivalent of Toms Shoes long before they were cool. No one wears a sneaker like an American.

Breakfast cereal, like footwear, is an anthropological marvel. If I ever get fooled into thinking I’m still living in the states, I can walk down the cereal aisle of an Australian grocery store. I always see my friend Uncle Toby and the sadistic pleasure he gets from taking iconic American cereals and coating them with even more sugar. Uncle Toby has a twin brother, Weet-Bix, who lives on a high-security organic farm called Sanitarium, where he manufactures tiny bales of hay and markets them as cereal. Sanitarium is a large Australian food company that is owned by the Seventh-day Adventist Church and therefore does not pay taxes. I am not kidding. Its tagline is “Good nutrition is part of the journey to a happy, healthy life.” The other part of the journey is learning how to properly digest cardboard.

I am more of a peanut butter on toast kind of girl. The whole concept of cold breakfast cereal is odd. Let’s process a whole mess of random grains, add vitamins and sugar, pour it in a bowl and drown it in milk. It seems like a lot of work when you could just rip off the end of a baguette. But I live in Perth, and I am already eating kangaroo salami. I will own you, Australian cereal. YOU ARE MINE.

I have tried several kinds of cereal in Perth. Uncle Toby’s Cheerios taste like Froot Loops – best suited to a late night snack. Last week I bought a cereal called Alpen, a “Swiss style muesli.” The box has a picture of a pretty snow-covered mountain, and the list of ingredients is written in both Malay and Arabic, so I felt fancy popping it in my cart. Apparently the Swiss start their day with a bowl of gray flour with a few oats and stale raisins.

Finally, there’s Weet-Bix, the Shredded Wheat of Down Under. (Uncle Toby also makes a version of Shredded Wheat, which I assume is actually chocolate covered marshmallows.) How can I become an honorary Australian citizen if I don’t like Weet-Bix? Unlike Vegemite, which seems more divisive, I have yet to find an Australian who does not love Weet-Bix. I have tried several varieties in the past couple of months– original, hi-bran, crunchy honey bites – and they all make me feel like I am being held hostage in a barn and my captor forgot to feed me the daily gruel so I am forced to eat wood shavings. Weet-Bix is survival food. Australians are pretty hard-core so it makes perfect sense that their attitude would be, “Crikey mate, stop crappin’ on and hand over the sawdust.” I refuse to try the gluten free version of Weet-Bix because, let’s face it, gluten free versions of normally tasty products tend to leave one questioning the very meaning of human existence. I fear the gluten free demon and what he will do to a box of Weet-Bix.

We Americans have our own types of Weet-Bix. I once caught my mother eating a bowl of Grape-Nuts on Yom Kippur, a day when many Jews fast and repent. With a mischievous twinkle in her eye, she told me her snack didn’t count as breaking the fast. She was right. Grape-Nuts is technically not food.