Playing With Our Food: Ready To Eat Cereal
When was the last time you bought cereal? What is called ready to eat cereal that is eaten right out of the box? If you are like many people, you might have stopped buying this kind of cereal because you may believe it is an unhealthy food. There are a lot of food fads that have come and gone, and all food fads are driven mostly by the wealthy. Those people who have enough money to have the luxury of turning down food. They can be picky eaters and not go hungry. The downward trend in consumer cereal purchases is another affluent food fad.
Ready to eat cereal is claimed to be bad for you by some. It is claimed by some that grains and sugar are bad for you. Cereal is nothing but unhealthy grains and sugar, they say. When the Kellogg brothers first invented their toasted flakes of corn, it was very bland, and over time improvements were made to the taste. One of these improvements to taste was the addition of sugar.
How much sugar is in the typical can of soda? Online one will likely find some video of a person heaping tablespoonfuls of granulated sugar into a glass to demonstrate just how much sugar is in a can of soda. One can imagine people pouring their soft drinks down the drain after watching such a video. The video is wrong (and not just because granulated sugar is not used in the making of soft drinks). In the food industry, where food product is mass produced, weight is the most accurate form of measurement. This is why on a can of soda the sugar content is in grams, and not in tablespoons. When the person in the video converts grams to tablespoons, the person gets the sugar content wrong. It is inaccurate. A tablespoon of sugar (or a sugar cube, or a packet of sugar), is not automatically the weight of a gram of sugar. Tablespoons are tablespoons, grams are grams. These units cannot be accurately interchanged. A gram of sugar must be accurately weighed to be a gram of sugar.
When I was a kid, General Mills advertised their Cheerios® cereal had less than one gram of sugar per serving. Other cereals, like Shredded Wheat, advertised no added sugar. Some cereal has more sugar, and some has less sugar. The consumer can choose. One doesn't even have to read the nutritional label to make an informed choice on sugar content because the name on the box and the picture is usually enough information. Sugar is used for a few reasons, one being taste.
Humans like the taste of sugar, the human body needs it, but more is not always better. Few people will eat spoonfuls of sugar from a bowl, or eat sugar cubes by the handful. Putting too much sugar in cereal will spoil the taste just as adding too little sugar might do the same. For example, I drink a lot of tea and I know how much sugar I need to make my tea taste how I like it. Too little or too much sugar and I have tea that I don't like the taste of. Put simply, sugar is an ingredient that is part of a recipe. Sugar is not added indiscriminately by manufactures. Doing that will result in a poor product that can't be sold. Sugar is also a commodity that is bought and sold each day on the world market. The price of sugar rises and falls daily, and manufactures want to use as little as possible of a commodity that has constant price fluctuations. Low prices are good, but high prices are bad. Sugar is not the only thing added to many cereals.
If one looks at the nutrition label on a box of ready to eat cereal, one will see that cereal is packed with added essential nutrients on top of the already present nutrients of the cereal crop (wheat, oats, or corn). Cereal has long been a simple healthy and fortified food. One of the best things about ready to eat cereal is it is inexpensive. Fortified cereal has the benefit of low cost.
Cereal does not cost much money. For people like me, cereal is an inexpensive fortified healthy food product. I need quality food at a low price. I do not follow the asinine food fads; however, food producers listen to consumers, no matter how dumb they are, because companies need to stay in business. I understand this, I know I am a consumer minority, but it is an extreme annoyance for me when alternatives to the food fads are not available. I either have to pay more for the same or lower quality, or I have to go without. I do not look forward to a day when I have to go without another healthy food product like cereal because of yet another stupid food fad.
© Trevor Dailey