Adult Cereal

From Health Matters:

Food companies first started to pitch breakfast cereals to kids in the 1950s, adding sugar to make it taste better, pressing them into amusing shapes, adding artificial colours, and putting cartoon characters on the box and prizes inside.

These are lots of good fun but a nutritional disaster.

Most kids' cereals are so highly processed they no longer resemble the grain they started out as, says Choice. They're high in added sugar, and they're also high in fat and salt. One of the worst was Kellogg's Coco Pops which, Choice says, is over one-third sugar. On the whole, adult cereal products are healthier.

At Super Fresh this summer, I noticed that the "adult cereals" were set apart on the shelf from the sugary stuff. There was actually a sign: "Adult Cereal."

Later that summer, as I was driving down Route 40, the seediest road in Central Maryland, full of cheap motels, seedy strip clubs, and "adult" bookstores, I realized how versatile the word "adult" has become. It is a synonym for maturity ("Act like an adult!") and depravity ("adult bookstore").

"We suggest parental guidance for this movie--it has adult content."

"Can we please be adults, here?"

But the next time I saw the "Adult Cereal" sign at Super Fresh, I couldn't shake the baser connotation. I told a friend about this, and we decided to start a line of adult cereals. Victoria's Secret Cereal. Cereal in the City. Tantric Chex.

For our racier line, we knew immediately to turn to RUFNKM for suggestions. So far, we've got Gilbert Grape's Nuts, Cocoa Muffs, and Leerios.

Any suggestions? This may revolutionize breakfast.