I love cereal. Along with hook & loop fasteners and Post-It Notes, cereal is one of humankind’s greatest achievements. Unlike some of the other delicacies popular during the 1970’s (Kraft Macaroni & Cheese), I have carried my fondness for cereal into my adult years. Indeed, there have been times in my adult life when a bowl of Cheerios was absolutely the only viable option for dinner.

For ten years of our lives, my two brothers and I spent an average (conservatively) of 650 hours – or 27 days –  sitting together at our kitchen table, eating cereal (five days a week x 15 minutes a day = 1.25 hours a week x 520 weeks). Qualitatively different from lunch, which we didn’t often eat together, and dinner, whose ambiance was affected by the presence of the parents, our cereal breakfasts, no matter how superficial the interactions, forged bonds between my brothers and me that endure to this day.

On the other side of the table, my brothers did not share my aversion to morning sweets. M was a passionate aficionado of Cap’n Crunch. His ability to eat massive quantities of these abrasive, gritty, sugar-coated corn cubes without shredding the roof of his mouth to ribbons inspired genuine awe. I rarely took the risk, but when I did sample Cap’n Crunch, I nibbled it ever so cautiously, fretting the sharp nuggets would lacerate the roof of my mouth. I could not understand how anyone ate it without bleeding. Maybe devotees waited for the cereal to get soggy before they risked biting into those thorny nubbins.

That theory, though, was wrong. The razor-sharp cereal doesn’t soften in milk, and we know this because the cereal’s spokesman told us so. Cap’n Crunch, a short, boxy man with a debonair mustache and a bad haircut, whom I now believe to have had a severe, untreated alcohol problem, boasted that the cereal “stays crunchy, even in milk…”.     So, how did my my brothers manage to eat this cereal without ripping the flesh off their tongues? Another one of life’s small mysteries remains unsolved. . . .

For kids like us who ate popular cereals and watched TV during the 1960’s and 1970’s, cereal mascots like the Cap’n were integrally related to the cereals they represented, and no cereal was without one. Their TV and box presence was so ubiquitous that none of us would have been particularly surprised if one morning we looked up from our bowls to see Sugar Bear, Tony the Tiger or Trix Rabbit sharing our table, reading the back of one another’s cereal boxes and shivering in our drafty kitchen.

Before he began his morning perusal of the cereal box’s text, riddles or comics, our youngest brother, D would devour a few huge, dry handfuls of the blood-sugar-spiking Lucky Charms. This cereal contains marshmallows, transmorgrified into tiny, innocent-appearing pastel-colored hearts, moons, stars, and clovers.  Marshmallows are close relatives of candy, or at least parents think so. That’s why a long time ago, as though placing the marshmallows into the Witness Protection Program, General Mills altered their shape, color and texture and renamed them “marbits” (a portmanteau of “marshmallow bits”).

This transparent effort to disguise the true nature of the marshmallows might have fooled the parents, but didn’t fool us: Whatever the grown-ups wanted to call them, these were marshmallows; they constituted 25% of this cereal, and that meant – impossible! – we could eat candy for breakfast. Candy! In the morning! Suh-weeeeet! Magically delicious, indeed! My brothers couldn’t get enough.

Relatively speaking, Lucky Charms is a complex, multi-faceted cereal; inside every box is a universe of drama and intrigue, most of it generated by its spokesperson, a small leprechaun with a kitschy Irish accent and an artificially avuncular tone of voice. “Lucky” an agile, hyperactive, short, green prankster, seemed to spend his every waking minute defending his bounty – the marbits – from takeover robberies by aggressive marshmallow thieves, who were “always after [his] lucky charms”. Lucky rebuffed their every effort. Nevertheless, despite their zero percent success rate over years of thwarted attempts, these marauders persisted in their efforts to take Lucky’s loot, rather than shifting their attentions to lower-security marshmallow outposts like campgrounds or Boy Scout jamborees.

As for Lucky, he was no smarter. Despite his 100% success rate at keeping the outlaws at bay, Lucky never relaxed the white-knuckled vigilance he maintained over his “charms”. The parties were forever at a standoff.

I must say, as an adult contemplating this situation, I am struck by its overtones of irony, hopelessness, and frustrated sexual desire. Indeed, from the wry joke of the leprechaun’s name to his own and the robbers’ Sisyphean destinies, trapped forever in their depressing cycles of failure, Lucky Charms was a kids’ cereal grappling with some dark adult challenges. That accounted in part for its popularity in our house, where the three of us lauded the persistence of the bad guys as enthusiastically as we condemned their incompetence, wishing that just once, they could relieve the spry green leprechaun with the annoying voice of at least some of his charms.

D and M were also Froot Loops fans. “Gimme that!”, D would yell, grabbing at the box M held aloft and just out of reach. “Come get it”, M would retort, tossing the box over D’s head and onto the table. There, the cereal would spill out, its distinct, plasticky, sickening, sugary aroma wafting nauseatingly into the air.

From its color to its smell to its flavor, this is one cereal I can’t abide. I was so accustomed to unsweetened cereals that the first time I tasted Froot Loops, I knew there was fraud afoot. Despite its claims, I thought, the cereal’s little colored Loops were not correspondingly fruit-flavored. The orange Loops did not taste like oranges any more than the red ones tasted like cherries. In fact, I was sure, all the Loops had the identical disgusting flavor.

My theory generated concerted objection from my brothers. One Saturday morning after a couple of years of morning debate, I conducted a short, yet elegant experiment, blindfolding D and challenging him to distinguish one Loop from another. This would prove, and it did, that every single Loop had the same flavor.

The boys then grudgingly conceded that “technically”, I was correct: all Loops were the same flavor. “But so what?”, M challenged.  “It’s still a fruity taste”.

“No, no no,” I protested, grabbing D’s spoon and zinging a Loop at M. “The point is, there is no fruit that tastes like this Froot Loop, and they all have the same disgusting fake flavor!”

“Yes there is”, he insisted. “Its called ‘Froot’. F-R O O T Loops. The actual flavor’s called ‘Froot'”.

“Really?” I retorted. “Then show me one singe actual fruit that’s spelled f-r-o-o-t!”

“Who cares”, D interrupted, taking a swig of milk from the carton. “No one ever said the stupid Loops had different flavors”.

This was inaccurate, as I proved with another simple experiment. Someone certainly did make that misrepresentation, and that someone was none other than– yep, Toucan Sam, mascot for Froot Loops, star of its commercials. and – if memory serves me – sometimes-speaker of Pig Latin, which he showed off in the TV ads.

Like his fellow TV celebs Lucky and the Cap’n, Sam had a special talent: he could sniff out a bowl of Froot Loops wherever it might be hiding.  Why was it hiding? No idea. How did he find it?  “Follow your nose,” he intoned, “it always nose. The flavor of fruit wherever it grows!” This was the core misrepresentation that  induced “Moms” to buy Froot Loops: the suggestion they contained real “growing” fruit, when in fact nothing could have been further from the trooth.

Despite the entertainment provided by the mascots and their dramas, the most exciting part of the cereal experience was the box offerings. Along with Cracker Jack, box cereal was the only food that offered us kids bribes in addition to sustenance. The bribes came in many forms, starting with the actual cereal box, the backs of which could offer myriad treasures, from 78 RPM records of “Yellow Submarine” (records! On a cereal box!) to mazes, baseball cards, Lone Ranger cut outs, cardboard airplanes, and puzzles. Plus, of course, the boxes contained wordage, and plenty of it, all targeted at the multitudes of kids like us who wanted to read as we crunched.

More bribes could be found inside the cereal boxes, and all pretense at civility broke down when there was a new box of cereal waiting to be opened and plumbed for a kazoo, little book, decal tattoo, or bike reflector. The parents expected us to take turns opening the new boxes, but they may as well have asked a pack of starving wild dogs to ‘sit’ or ‘shake’, so bloodthirsty were we to find and pocket the prize. I can see D, a jacket over his pajamas, his entire arm buried deep in a box of Honeycomb groping for the prize, running through the kitchen, M behind him yelling, “Give it back!”

Once as M plunged both hands into a box of Quisp to find the parachute-man, D and I yanked the box away from him so violently it flew up into the air and broke the ceiling light, causing a shower of glass shards and little Quisp-saucers to rain down upon us as our skirmish distinegtrated into a barroom-type brawl.

Cereal’s final enticement lay in the endless box tops campaigns, in which you could score a prize if you mailed the fold over box tops to the company to prove you bought the cereal. Requiring an envelope and stamps, the boxtops were a bit beyond us; the fact that the companies almost always wanted boxtops from two boxes of cereal displeased the parents, who hated being manipulated into making a purchase they might not otherwise make solely to win a plastic “prize” their kids would fight over for 15 minutes before it broke.

It wasn’t until we were older that my brothers and I experimented with the next tier of breakfast cereals, which included less sugary varieties like Shredded What, as we called the funny little haystacks, Raisin Bran and Wheaties. To us, these represented the more “mature” cereal choices that the bigger kids sometimes ate. Concerned about the quality of the box prizes, and hearing repeated rumors that none of these sensible cereals contained even one marshmallow, my brothers successfully postponed this landmark event until we were well over 11 years of age.

Until then, when our schedules began to diverge, the three of us continued to eat breakfast together, bundled up in the polar climate of the kitchen, critiquing box prizes or reading box text, until cars loaded with kids pulled up outside, tearing us away from one another, and spiriting each of us off to school.