A disclaimer: this column contains a spoiler alert that may cause sleepless nights, gout and the heartbreak of psoriasis. Proceed with caution, mon freres.
There are lots of reasons we Americans are losing faith in our institutions.
To wit: Many people are disputing an election that has objectively been declared the most scrutinized and secure in history, grocery stores are selling little bitty grapefruit-sized watermelons for $5 and Michael Bolton was seen entering a recording studio again.
Egads!!!
Most distressing, though, is the recent – “recent” by me: you may have already known – discovery that the different-colored O’s in Froot Loops all taste the same. And if you did know, how come nobody told me so I wouldn’t have called up to the Harris Teeter to complain that the last box I purchased didn’t have enough of the “lemony” ones?
You know all those mornings you sat at the breakfast table meticulously separating the purple Loops because their flavor clashed with the green Loops, or hoarding the yellow ones because you wanted an extra dose of vitamin C?
A waste of time, old bean, because – as a Kellogg’s executive confirmed in a 2014 interview - the red, yellow, purple, green, orange and blue loops are not individually flavored and all taste the same.
Have we all succumbed to the power of suggestion, the “Emperor’s New Clothes” syndrome – where we think we taste something and like it because we’re told we taste it and like it?
“Absolutely,” Dr. Anthony Smith, a Durham-based psychologist, said when I called him up. The brain works that way “not only with taste, but with smell also. It does that with things we think we see – e.g. partial words – that we fill in” while we’re reading, he said.
He then said a whole bunch of impressive-sounding, educated stuff about the brain and neurons.
Fascinating stuff, really, right up there with the eternal question posed by the classic song Does your chewing gum lose its flavor on your bedpost overnight?
(It does.)
But I just wanted to know how come, for 50-some years, I was convinced that my purple Froot Loop tasted like grapes and the yellow ones tasted like lemons?
Some sort of “cereal sorcery” is the only answer one can reasonably come up with.
Kellogg’s, if it’s smart, could seize upon this opportunity to restore America’s faith in at least one of its institutions by actually individually flavoring its loops. Think of the party that would take place in our mouths with each spoonful.
Even better, think of the jobs that would create, since they’d need to hire thousands of certified froot flavorers and testers.
Even better, the company could use Froot Loops to teach a much-needed lesson about the interconnectedness – the oneness - of humanity: regardless of what color you are on the outside, we all taste the same once we’re poured into a bowl and drenched in milk.
(Okay, maybe they’ll have to refine that message a bit.)
Most of us learned long ago that breakfast cereals are not typically associated with healthy eating. The few that are healthy tend to taste like unflavored twigs.
Even eating grits - for my money nature’s perfect, most versatile food that I could eat every day - is less healthy than eating the box they come in.
But to discover that a cereal with “froot” in its very name is not healthy?
Oy.
What’s next for our beleaguered nation? How much more can we stand?
It seems inconceivable, but one day soon we may wake up and discover that Cap’n Crunch’s Crunch Berries aren’t real berries.
Barry Saunders is a member of the Editorial Board and founder of thesaundersreport.com.