Monthly Archives: April 2019

The Empty Bowl Episode Eleven: The Crossed Wands of Waldo and Jarvis

That’s the thing about bowls: they always come a-round again.

Yes, Justin McElroy and I have steeped ourselves once more in the cosmically flowing milk of human kindness to bring you another 23-minute escape from the doldrums of today and into the cereal world of tomorrow. It’s an intentionally subdued show into which you can submerge both your worries and your Mini-Wheats, as the crashing sounds of a pasteurized ocean turn them mushy and easier to handle.

In our eleventh episode, we talk melt-in-your-mouth Cap’n Crunch and the droll joy of pharmacological Phroot Loops, before turning a sculptor’s eye to a few cereal mascots who could use a modern makeover.

If this episode alone can’t soggify your sorrows, you can find more 20–30 minute O-shaped odyssies at our Anchor hub, follow along on Twitter, or send in a listener question. We can’t discuss or respond to every email, but they make great conversation starters at the office water 2% cooler.

News: Cascadian Farm Releases Limited Kernza Cereal to Promote Climate Change-Fighting Grain

Kernza Cereal

Move over, Life: there’s a new cereal that’s kid tested, and Mother Nature approved.

But much like climate change, we’ll need to act quickly if we want to get a handle on it. It’s called Honey Toasted Kernza Cereal, and it’s the result of an initiative by General Mills and Cascadian Farm that’s over two years in the making, all to promote its namesake grain.

See, Kernza is an official name for intermediate wheatgrasses that have a number of positive environmental impacts, from helping fauna restore their habitats to protecting our flora’s water supply—not to mention keeping more carbon from impacting our atmosphere.

Kernza vs Climate Change

While I don’t cover nearly as many “healthy” cereals on this blog as I do stomach-frostingly sweet ones, I’ll do anything I can to signal-boost a cereal that ensures a future world where we can still eat gut-glazingly sugary breakfasts—and it’s probably a more sustainable cereal eco-solution than living off the grid in a cabin made of mortared Mini-Wheats.

(Can you imagine the dust problems in the crawlspace?)

Cascadian Farm’s Honey Toasted Kernza Cereal can be acquired by donating $25 or more to The Land Institute. 100% of the money goes to this group that’s helping hype up Kernza across the globe, so it can be a bigger household name than all those second millennia-old bananas found in Ancient Grain Cheerios. By unfortunate circumstance, Honey Toasted Kernza Cereal is more limited of an edition than anticipated: crop failure led to a smaller harvest that could only constitute 6,000 boxes.

So if you want to pair your morning R&R with a little PR for an especially green greenhorn grain, head to the cereal’s Fundly page.

Review: Baked AF Cereal Box Bundt Cakes

Baked AF Cereal Bundt Cakes Review

7, 13, 42, 69: different cultures have deemed just about every number as “lucky” over the ages, but for my Honey Bunches of Money, no numeral quite brings peace like a dozen: I mean, it’s got zen right in the name! And when I gaze upon twelve doughnuts, mini bundt cakes, or fluid ounces of coffee mixed with Snickers* creamer**, I can’t help but feel my anxieties abdicate my abdomen to free up precious real estate for doughy delight.

That’s why, when the aptly named DJ Baby Bundt Cake on Twitter offered to mail me a dozen of his bakery Baked AF‘s new cereal-inspired confections, I couldn’t help but start raking my front yard into a zen garden whilst camped out catching koi in Animal Crossing, all in anticipation of the coming mail carrier, who would bestow a satchel of divine delicacy upon me like an unknowing bodhisattva.

*I don’t mess around when it coming to doughnut dunking.
*I also colloquially call this dense nectar “Thickers Coffee Creamer.” Continue reading

Spooned & Spotted: Bob Ross – The Joy of Cereal

Bob Ross The Joy of Cereal at FYE

To all those elementary school art teachers who told me I’d “never make it in life” if I kept “talking about eating paint”: look at me now, doubters! The one you called a “disruption” in 3rd grade is now disrupting the cereal journalism world. Seriously, does the world need more Vincent van Play-Dohs, or someone who can see a placid bowl of milk as a blank canvas?

(I owe it to all those tempting saucers of Elmer’s for priming my mind to love creamy dairy.)

If there’s anyone who would have nurtured my longtime love of interpretive cereal art, it would’ve been Bob Ross. Hailing from the same class of divine earthly kindness shepherds as Mr. Rogers, the late Robert Norman “Bob” Ross has seen his legacy of nonjudgemental encouragement and zen-like countenance revived in recent years, as an increasingly troubling world calls for innocent escapism into the ever-accepting landscapes of Bob’s paintings. Heck, you can still watch The Joy of Painting marathons streamed on Twitch each weekend—certainly a better weekend plan than downing a couple glasses of Pantone Punch*.

*Goes without saying, but please do not ever drink paint—just swirl some food coloring into your endmilk instead. Continue reading

Review: Tropical Froot Loops from Mexico!

Kellogg's Mexico Tropical Froot Loops Review Box

(Note: the box got a just a little dinged during its journey North. Must’ve been hungry carrier pigeons.)

Look, are we all just going to ignore the fact that, before Tropical Froot Loops, Toucan Sam clearly had no idea what fruit is?

And I’m not talking the layperson’s misclassification of pumpkins and tomatoes as vegetables—follow your nose deep into your noggin and try to remember the last time you heard Froot Loops’ lifelong spokesbird actually reference a real fruit by name. Lemonberries, starberries, wildberries: all ambiguous amalgamations of nature’s genuine bounty invented to hide the fact that “Froot” is much less of a natural flavor than it is a state of mind kids can tastefully chase outside the bounds of reality and into whichever adjacent universe where the grass is limeberry green and the fruit salads are crunchy.

[Though to Sam’s credit, his original iteration did wear a fruit-flocked Carmen Miranda hat. My two-pronged rebuttal to this is a) toucans can’t pass the mirror test, so he’s likely never recognized his own headgear, and b) the first Toucan Sam was undoubtedly throttled by the current Toucan Sam’s slenderly feathered man fingers.]

Thankfully, Froot Loops in Mexico largely preserve the two-dimensional Toucan Sam design of yore, though the worryingly articulate prehensility with which he’s gripping the Tropical Froot Loop on this box still leaves me concerned he’ll snap—or at least snap half the universe away. Continue reading