January 19, 2023 • 54 mins
Cereal is everywhere these days. While diet trends come and go, those ubiquitous boxes and mascots seem here to stay -- and, in some cases, it seems people are buying an idea as much as buying a foodstuff. In part two of this two-part series, Ben, Noel and Max trace the brilliant, at-times Machiavellian marketing moves that led cereal to glory... and ask how long those days may last.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:27):
back to the show Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always
so much for tuning in. This is part two of
a continuing history of Breakfast Cereal, So if you have
not heard part one, you might not be totally lost,
but you will enjoy this on a deeper level. Uh,
I think that's fair to say. Always. Yeah, Ben, I
(00:50):
have to tell you, Um, I'm Noll by the way,
and you're Ben. The first part of this series, you
opened the show by asking Max and myself whether we
had eaten cereal for breakfast or you know, any kind
of breakfast cereal. I come to you today having not
eaten breakfast cereal exactly, but I did eat French toast sticks.
(01:10):
I don't know if anyone's familiar with this innovation. They
come in sticks now pre sticks, and uh you just
pop them in the ove him and boy howdy are
those things delightful and they don't feel for some reason
the stick for makes it feel as though it's not
as heavy as either regular French toast, which maybe just
a complete Jedi mind trick. But as we'll find out today,
(01:33):
cereal is full of those breakfast foods is an industry,
you know, from Bacon on down. Big shout out to
our super producer, Mr Max Williams. Max or French toast
sticks new to you. I mean I don't really eat
anything breakfast at all. I mean I've had them before,
but I mean they're cool invention. The only breakfast I
will eat is bagels and locks. That's about it. It's
(01:54):
pretty great. Yeah, I'm it's it's amazing. I'm on the
road and I almost got some almost at a bagel
and Locks when I got in when I blew into
town at a twenty four hour gets hype place. But it, uh,
I think I might have a new like rule for myself.
I don't think I should get bagels at like two
(02:16):
am from a place that's open, not exclusively as a diner.
They were selling lots of stuff, you know. You speaking
of diners, By the way, do you know what the
criteria for a diner is. I just found this out recently.
It just has to have like an open kitchen and
a bar with seats, and mainly they're known for serving
(02:37):
breakfast food all day. But specifically that's the main criteria
for something being considered a diner. Then that explains why
a lot of things could be called diners in general.
You know, there was that kind of a there was
that fad where you would see people go to juice bars,
like juice diners and oxygen gin bars. Um. Yeah, now
(03:02):
that that seems like a good grift, but it still
has nothing on cereal. When we left off in our
previous episode, we teased one of our favorite, um weirdest
aspects of the modern breakfast cereal game, which is of
course the marketing, the merchandizing, the mascots. You know, it's like, look,
(03:24):
a lot of this stuff became geared for children and
started out often as a food of convenience or even
more importantly, a purported health food, and then they started
realizing that if you wanted to get the sale done,
if you wanted to get that box into the shopping
cart and into the into the household kitchen, you needed
(03:48):
the kids on your side. This is something that old
dirty Bastard would point out famously in Wu Tang, Right,
Wu Tang is for the kids, and breakfast cereal is
for the kids if you want to make a profit.
And that's why, uh in nineteen o nine Kellogg's that
we talked to a lot about Previously, they introduced the
(04:09):
first ever Cereal Box prize, and this happened at the
same time that the the covers of these boxes were
getting more and more interesting and marketing increasingly towards children.
Do you guys remember Cereal box prizes? That that was
the only time I would like hang with Cereal as
(04:32):
a kid, because I knew there was stuff at the
bottom of the bag. Yeah, And it was always one
of those kind of like disappointing kind of things where
like it was more about the expectation than it was
about what you actually got when you got to the bottom.
And then they started doing this clever thing, or maybe
it was the other way around, where you wouldn't actually
get the thing in the box. You'd get like you'd
(04:53):
have to mail in box tops or there'd be some
kind of little coupon. It reminds me of like the
Dakota Ring and Crackers acts, you know from from a
Christmas story. He didn't actually get the thing right away,
he had to mail in a bunch of like box
there was a ton actually to get the Dakota Ring,
and then it was all just a marketing ploy in
and of itself, which has I think we talked about
(05:15):
that in an episode of Ridiculous History. I'm pretty certain,
um basically about ovalte. Yeah, that's right, that's the chocolate
e mineral based drink. And again, you know, let's go
back to our buddy John Harvey Kellogg, who initially, you know,
was trying to promote healthy, clean living, and then his
brother kind of took that whole concept and ran with it, besmirching,
(05:36):
honestly the legacy of his brother by you know, having
kind of sugary cereals. Originally, serial companies like Kellogg didn't
really see the value in marketing directly to kids, but
then it became pretty clear, relatively quickly, like I think
by the early nineteen hundreds, uh, that this was absolutely
the way to go. This is the play. I mean,
(05:58):
they also did. Let's let's talk about that first prize
for kids in Cereal. You had to buy not one,
but two boxes of corn flakes. And like you said, no,
they had to prove they had purchased these, either through
sending something in the mail or going directly to the
grocery store where they bought these. And if you could
(06:20):
prove you bought two boxes of corn flakes. You got
a book like a pamphlet called the Funny Jungle Land
Moving Pictures Booklet, And this this is something that all
other cereal makers paid attention to. By the time you
get to the middle of the twentie century, especially in
post war years, you see that advertisers have kind of
(06:43):
taken parents out of the equation. Parents are a footnote.
They're relegated to something like this is part of a
balanced breakfast, or this is nutrition. The rest of the
ads are all gonna be about look at these great
bears get big yellow on the corn pops, or look
at this really creepy clown who wants to sell you
(07:05):
sugar crisp. That was especially traumatic. Yeah, he just showed
it to to Max and I, uh, first thing in
the morning before we recorded, and I think we were
both somewhat sugar. Can we hear a little clip of
this monstrosity and just picture the absolute creepiest clown you
could possibly imagine, emerging from a chicken coop kind of that.
(07:26):
Then he stands up and rips through this backdrop made
of paper, uh, and then proceeds to sit down at
this little table and give us the spield take us
from Corincle. That's the best breakfast under the Big Top
is post sugar rice corrinkles so correctly, so delicious, so different.
Each grain of rice and sugar rice wrinkles. It's currinkled
(07:49):
with honey and sugar. So what you could what if
we walk you through this? Yeah, you can see the
guy burst through the uh the weird paper screen and
he's got what Stephen King is called double zero kind
of serial killer eyes all all, there's no real pupil iris.
(08:12):
They just kind of suck you in his makeup because deadlights, Yeah, deadlights,
just makeup. Because it's a black and white ad spot.
It all looks like his face is white and black
and I don't know, it looks like he if he
opened his mouth and just held it open, blood or
ichor would seep out of it. It's it's weird. It's
(08:34):
because of the the you know, honestly, it's it's beautifully
filmed in a lot of ways, but because of the
contrast of those blacks are so black and the whites
are so white, and then the separation from the foreground
the background are really well done. But you're right, because
of how black the makeup like around his mouth is
it looks like how you think of like blood and
like psycho or something. And we're from the post gay
(08:57):
sy world, so our that's the film troll and uderstanding
of clowns is way different. Anyway, people loved all these mascots,
aside from I know we went out of our way
to show you the spooky Why we're gonna talk about
some more, but when we um, when we're talking about commercials,
I want to give a shout out to Sugar Crisp.
This commercial was a game changer. It's the first animated
(09:19):
TV commercial in the world of Cereal and as three bears, Handy, Dandy,
and Candy, and years later these guys would all be
kind of consolidated into the singular sugar Bear. Uh. Yeah,
I think I made the slightly of off color comment
(09:41):
that sugar Bear looks like he's maybe a little under
the influence. Um most definitely did that, Yeah, but I
think I took it a little further, like he's he
looks like you would kind of picture some sort of
jazz junkie, you know, Like I mean, he's just got
these like really barely open eyes, but he doesn't seem
like high on on jazz cigarettes. He seems more like
(10:04):
he's on on the on the stuff. Oh I remember
this guy. Yeah, yeah, very lack of jasicle, you know,
like always wearing long sleeves. I'm saying, no, no, no,
bear sleeves. That's not true. You can't find pictures of
him in more of a chill T shirt summer outfit.
(10:25):
But but if you you know, we're applying adult mindsets
to these cartoons, and in many cases, when you're a kid,
these just seem really cool. You're buying the idea as
much as you're buying the food. Uh. There was I
think it was cookie crisp, I want to say had
(10:47):
right there. It was a cop there's a cop and
and a rabid dog kind of and yeah, and then
there was of course, we know all all the big
ones named the monster pant On with Chocola and Frank
and Barry and um yummy mummy is that one of them? Yeah?
And now that's the thing that they released for the
(11:08):
nostalgia play, you know, right around the right around the
spooky seasons. Yeah, just like what do you call it?
Just like Ecto plasma coolers when those got re released
by High Sea or something we also see that Sugar
Crisp is a pioneer and focusing on children. Roy Rogers,
(11:31):
who had this very popular TV show in his day,
started telling cutting parents out of the equation almost entirely
and talking directly to kids in his TV show. He
would say, ask your mom to get a package of
our favorite cereal post Sugar Crisp. They were moving boxes
and other other companies didn't want to be left behind.
(11:53):
Kelloggs makes corn pops in nineteen fifty two, they come
back with frosted flakes. Trick is way older than I
had thought it was. It's from nineteen fifty four, and uh,
you know, it's weird because we talked a lot about
the role of sugar in you know, it's insidious in
the modern West. But I wasn't aware of this back
(12:16):
in the day in the nineteen fifties. Especially the amount
of sugar in these things came was advertised as a bonus.
It was a plus, like you don't have to add sugar.
We had talked about that kind in the last episode.
It's just I think the research just wasn't there, you know,
on some of the long term health effects of eating
(12:36):
too much sugar, not to mention with children, and then
we start to see you know, rising cases of things
like childhood diabetes, and I bet you could draw a
line directly to you know, among other things, you know,
like sugary snacks and such, but to breakfast cereals and
on all this marketing that we're talking about. Um, you know,
this obviously continued and just kind of kept at at
(12:58):
a fever pace up until today. I mean, I guess
we don't really Most of the cereal mascots that we
see today are some future iteration of a legacy one,
you know that kind of started in this golden age
of cereal mascots. You don't see a lot of new
cereals launched. It's usually some new flavor of rice crispies,
it's got some movie tie in, or you know, I think, uh,
(13:19):
what what is it? Frosted Flakes has like an Avatar
tie in, where like Tony the Tigers like went dressed
in Avatar gear, but they didn't make him blue weirdly.
But we also see some kind of more drastic, let's say,
evolution of some of these mascots. In the seventies, Uh,
Lucky Charms was wrapped not by Lucky the lepre con
but by Waldo the Wizard um and the the famous
(13:43):
catchphrase they're magically delicious wasn't a thing. Waldo referred to
Lucky Charms as being you see, if I can't even
do this able dibibble delicious delicious about that? That's a mouthful.
That's like a super califragilistic Crinkle's territory. Man, I don't
mean I don't love it. Are we surprised that didn't
(14:03):
catch on? Uh? It's still wubba lubba dub dub dub.
But a big reason that Lucky one out was because
of market testing. So like I mean, they're doing these
characters in the same way that you know movies are focused,
group tested and things like that. They actually get like
kids in a room to respond to see which one
(14:23):
they respond to more. And while Waldo went out of inch,
you know, at first, Lucky came down and uh and
destroyed him, totally erased him from history because of the stereotypes, right,
who does good stereotype? That's a good point. Yeah, but
been weirdly, you know, he's still around today. They've kind
of you know, they don't really do as many I
(14:43):
don't have cable, so I don't really know if if
if I'm missing something, but I don't see as many
Lucky Charms ads, you know with the leprechn Lucky the
leprechn doing kind of a full, you know, stereotypical Irish lilt.
Uh yeah, you know. The literally the only thing I've
seen that references Lucky Charms at all in recent years
(15:04):
is a parody from uh, from Rick and Morty from
Interdimensional Cable, where they have a have a very not
charming serial commercial and it's it's that's right. Yeah, I
do remember that one. Well, is it okay? Is it?
Is it cannibalism? Though now I want to I'll be clear.
(15:25):
I'm not condoning the actions of those children, but is
a leper con to be taken as human or is it?
Or is it more like eating um a related promiscrats? Yeah? Well, actually,
if I remember correctly, which I do remember correctly, they're
not actually eating the leper con, but they're trying to
get the cereal out of the leprech, So it is
(15:47):
not cannibalism. It's just I mean there's sex on there
at that point. Yeah. Yeah, people listening to this right now,
so you know, exactly gas. But I mean, you know,
we have ones that we know, like Lucky the Leprechaun,
(16:10):
Tony the Tiger, which actually debut Beckett in the early
nineteen fifties. And I'm just guessing here, but I have
a feeling that Tony got buffer and buffer and buffer
as time went on, as the original Tony was more
like a tiger the tiger kind of slinky fellow. And
then uh started started definitely juicing and uh we again,
(16:32):
you know, there's still information about uh nutritional benefits for
the parents who are going to read the back of
the label or they're gonna see a splash that says,
you know, with all your daily iron or fiber or
potassium or whatever. It seems there was this trend for
focusing on a couple of nutritional benefits. But this again,
(16:55):
like we teased earlier, kind of goes to the wayside.
Through the sixties, cereal boxes are tall can less about
the benefits that were touted during the days of granula,
and more about the taste, the fun, the flavor now
with more berries, you know what I mean. And uh,
(17:15):
they didn't need to convince people that you should eat
cereal in the morning because that had already become part
of culture, at least in the United States, so it
was a foregone conclusion. People would say, Oh, yeah, it's morning,
I've got a kid. I gotta get some milk. I
gotta get some cereal. That's how we do things. And
so now the now the industry is in this really cool,
(17:39):
weird place where they can say, Okay, we know everybody
needs cereal. Now we just need to help you figure
out which one to buy, and we can add all
kinds of bells and whistles for that purpose. Yeah, and
and the message kind of pivoted away from nutrition and
toward like pep, you know what I mean, Like it
gives you energy. It gives you the energy to take
(18:01):
on the day, even if you're a little kid. And
you know you mentioned, uh. The idea of marketing these
things is being fun as being like experiential, Like if
you eat the lepre con cereal, you're basically a leprechn
at this point, you know, eating frosted flakes is going
to turn you into a cartoon tiger, at least from within. Um,
it's like anamorphous kind of situation on swivel. It's an
(18:22):
adventure to eat tricks because you gotta you gotta go
quick and make sure that rabbit doesn't sneak around and
try to pull a heist. Yeah, and that rabbits on
drugs too. By the way, just for for the record,
they're in some sort of magical fairy land. That I
believe is that it's either the children have accidentally eaten
some mushrooms that they shouldn't have in the woods, you know,
and they're hallucinating this whole experience. That's just my uh,
(18:44):
it's just my my back story. Um. But yeah, I
mean think you started seeing things like, you know, coco pebbles,
which were now we're Coco pebbles always tied in with
the flint Stones because the flint stones are old. So
I mean I kind of think that probably cocoa and
fruity pebbles were always a television high end from the start. Yeah,
the flint Stones did exist before, well before the Post
(19:07):
Company started making pebble varieties of food like cocoa pebbles
or fruity pebbles. But I also want to say, and
I don't wanna, I don't want to flip any wigs
over ahead of Barbara, but the Flintstones were always kind
of sellouts, right, Like they did smoking ads back in
the day. I can't remember which brand of cigarette it was,
(19:29):
but they were all about it. Right. Early flint Stone
cartoons were in black and white, and they occupied a
lot of the same space as you know, those kind
of like, uh, those craft theater kind of shows. You
know that we're spotting that we're totally sponsored whole hog
by a brand. And that was really the only reason
some of these shows existed in the first place, you know,
it was to sell the products. I mean, that's always
(19:50):
kind of how television has been. It wasn't like, Okay,
we're gonna put out amazing art and then maybe sell
some ads. It's now, we're gonna sell some ads, and
we have to put something around the ads. So we're
gonna call that television, right, And so I looked it up.
It is Winston Cigarettes. As they also did beer commercials
as well, which is really kind of you know, it's
kind of a jarred here system because we think of
(20:11):
The Flintstones very much as a children's show, but it's
like get your cigarettes and your beer. Well the parents
were watching too, right, But also the flint Stones was
kind of a cartoon um equivalent of like the Honeymooners.
So it really was kind of built around these very
adult tropes and they were like, you know, marital disputes
and things like that, only surrounded by like you know,
(20:34):
animals that served as household appliances. Yeah, and so we
see that the Coco Pebbles, which is kind of a
new iteration of sugar crisp, is the first cereal that
is made as a kind of merchandizing spinoff of a
TV show. It's made from the Flintstones and the as
(20:56):
We're Winston cigarettes Kitty Winston cigarettes not related. Flintston has
just did a very poor taste add for them. They
also said, look, kids, don't just think of our fun
and frolick e mascots. Think of all the cool stuff
we can do. It's cooler than the cereal that your
frenzied at school. We can coat things with different bright colors,
fruity pebbles. We can add freeze dried fruit or marshmallows,
(21:20):
things that look like fruit. We can make them different shapes,
you know, just like fruit snacks would be later with
gushers and fruit by the foot and so on, And
with the sugar thing because again, people didn't know how
bad sugar could be. Uh, it gives you energy, so
they're kind of advertising this thing that's a five hour
energy drink, a red Bull um, a a rave aesthetic, right,
(21:45):
and then it comes with a cool anthropomorphic animal cartoon
that you can hang out with and will approve of
you us. But it's like, on every level, this is
really brilliant. Oh and then you participate the prices, you
could win stuff, You could enter sweep steaks like we
(22:06):
mentioned with wheaties, you could feel like you were in
some way interacting with the celebrity or athlete that that
you loved and looked up to. UM. And then we
talked about grape nuts. I I feel like we should go.
There were adult cereals. It wasn't all for kids. You
mentioned grape nuts. That just reminded me to mention Sir
grape Fellow, which is not a serial that's familiar with,
(22:29):
but it was kind of in that same kind of
marketed to children's product line. And by the way, last thing,
cocoa pebbles and fruity pebbles were actually repurposed Rice crenkles. Yeah,
this is fascinating, and you know we could spend know
you mentioned we're before recording today, we could spend so
much time just do eight episodes about individual cereal mascots.
(22:52):
It's surprising how many might be unfamiliar to us today,
but we're a huge deal in their time. There's this
guy named Uh, Big Yellow whose job was just to
sell you sugar corn pops. And if you look at him,
he was in a lot of stuff. If you look
at him, he's just a semi ridiculous blonde man with
(23:13):
a big chin and a huge that looks to be
a sixties seventy gallon hat and it kind of looks
like the Curious George Dad. Yeah. Yeah, man with a
big yellow hat. And it does appear that you can
get Big Yellow as a funko pop figure. Yeah. It
looks like kellogg is leaning into this nostalgia, you know, play,
(23:35):
as they do with so many other things. And I
believe that that sugar corn pops is maybe now just
corn pops, and you dropped the sugar from the name,
but it looks like the same little nuggets. Yeah, and
then he got Big Yellow got Uh. His whole thing
was he's so rich that he's core pops. I guess
it looks like an oil magnetor yeah, like some sort
(23:57):
of like he's got life on the range. He's like,
I'm drilling, drilling for black gold. And then he got
he got replaced, he get phased out and replaced with
a porcupine. But maybe he's still out there doing things
in a big yellow style. All right, we're working live,
moving on. Uh. The the thing you need to know
(24:18):
is that there were still healthy or there were still
cereals marketing themselves as healthy wheaties, corn flakes, grape nuts,
all kinds of things with brand in the title, and
they talked about you know, you'd see diet fads reflected
in cereal. So if you were counting calories, you'd see
(24:38):
the advertisements coming out that said, uh, this has you
don't just blank number of calories and all you need
is and there's a lot of stuff about one bowl.
One bowl contains of your daily you know, requirements of
blah blah blah. Remember um, there's a great Saturday at
Live commercial about that about the fiber the fiber pyramid.
Do you guys remember that one? Now it's or colon
(25:00):
blow Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, Yeah, that's that's exactly it.
Thank you. Yeah, check out the Colon blow commercial if
you want a sense of how far this. Oh yeah,
I know you're talking about one of my favorite, uh
in terms of just like the most bland sounding kind
of adult cereals that are like meant so that's the thing.
(25:21):
It's sort of fractured or there was not a backlash exactly,
but they realize, oh, we can also sell this to,
you know, to adults like we did in the early days,
so that things like Basic four by General Mills. It's
literally just like you know, oat flakes with nuts and
vanilla clusters, and I almost guarantee you has the same
amount of sugar in it as some of those kids cereals.
(25:44):
It's all a grift, man, Oh I'm sure. Yeah. And
then people said, you know, cereal doesn't always have to
be a breakfast food. You could also be a snack
you're on the goat, you're on a hike, you're on
a trip with the kids, or you can make it
more than just a meal by itself. You can use
it in recipes. This was very clever because they wanted
(26:07):
to get past that, they wanted to expand past that
association with breakfast so you would see things like the
Cheerios recipe booklet. Crushed them up, use them like bread crumbs,
use them to bread pork chops or um what what are?
They're all kinds of crushed cereal toppings in cakes and
sweet snow too. Right, Yeah, I guess the one that
(26:28):
comes to mind immediately is Rice Crispy Treats, because you know,
it's sort of like, um, how Elmer's Glue has kind
of like figured out how to rebrand to be not
no longer really a glue company, but a slime making company,
you know, so they sell all these kids that are
literally just glue and glitter and like whatever the other
ingredients you need to think it's some kind of soap
(26:48):
to make the slime that the kids used to be
super into. I don't know if that fat is still around,
but yeah, Rice Crispy is you know how to figure
it out? They they sold you like a family activity, right,
making Rice Crispy treats with the kids, sort of like
Jello jigglers. Remember those It was literally just jello that
you cut out with a cookie cutter. Therefore, now it's
(27:09):
a whole other thing they can market with the same
exact stuff. But then you started getting pre made those
cereal bar as you're talking about, and Rice Crispy treats,
you know, pre packers. That's a little more of a
modern innovation. We'll get to that. Yeah, And I gotta say,
you know what, I just never got into Rice Crispy treats.
I don't have too much of a sweet tooth. But
people love them, love them, I think to me, they've
(27:31):
always just felt like a let down snack, like when
you get a fruit cup and it's mostly melon, you
know what I mean. You can't stand them. It's like, honey, dude,
It's like, why is that one candle unservice to a party?
It thinks they can bring his dumbass friend, honey do along.
You don't get a plus one candle up? More like
honey don't? Am I Right? But but we were, we
(27:53):
were teasing the modern era a little bits, and you know,
the things were kind of in flux, right, and then
it all kind of even out, Like I only haven't
been too many serial innovations that we could speak of
or like again, new cereals, new exciting serial brands. A
lot of it was just kind of repurposed and tweaked
marketing campaigns for existing brands. But by the seventies and
(28:14):
eighties they were really kind of playing against the whole
sugar thing, like removing the words sugar from sugar pops
and stuff like that, because we did start to see
research and again this rise in childhood obesity and uh
diabetes and things like that that were of concern. Um.
And even in the early seventies, we had folks like
dr Atkins, you know of the Afkins diet fame, talking
(28:37):
about how carbs were bad for you, and what is
serial if not just a big old bowl of carbs, right,
just like just like the early days of the granula paste. Uh,
this this stuff was this was kind of a reckoning, right,
Those greens did not look as healthy anymore. People started
to question some of the more out there health claims
(29:00):
from cereals of yesteryear, and they started saying, hey, there's
also just a uh, there's so much sugar in this
that it might not look like a bowl of cake,
but in some situations, am I feeding my kid and
myself a bowl of cake? So healthy cereals doubled down.
They say, we got all the vitamins, we got all
(29:20):
the protein, the fiber, what whatever you are seeking my
grocery store, sojourner, you have found it in this box.
Sugar crisps gets renamed golden crisp. This is also what
we see a lot of people pulling sugar out of
the sugar corn pops corn pops now and because like
you said, it used to be almost a selling point,
(29:41):
so they wanted to highlight that, and now they kind
of wanted to hide it. And they probably did, you know,
reduce the amount of sugar from those early just you know,
knock your socks off levels. But certainly sugar is still
part of the equation because that's the whole point. It's
supposed to taste good, it's supposed to taste sweet. And
then we get to something very clever. This is very
(30:01):
Edward Burnet's style. They know they're still there's still a
viable market in selling sugar to kids in the morning, right.
They know they can still sell that stuff all the time,
and there might be some adults who are buying it
just because they've been eating it themselves for years. But
they knew they had to fight back against the sugar thing,
the health concerns, which are very valid. This is where
(30:24):
we see the introduction of the balanced breakfast or the
complete breakfast that becomes the balanced breakfast. They say, okay,
we can't just keep telling these people you can eat
cinnamon toast crunch and you'll be absolutely fine, and that
it's healthy for you to do that every day of
your life. But we can say it's healthy as part
(30:45):
of a larger breakfast orange juice, fruit, milk, maybe some eggs,
if you throw a bowl of cereal in. The companies
are still making money, but it also seems less egregious
for the consumer. That's brilliant. And I imagine this around
the same time we started seeing that trope of um
of sitcom and movie fame where somebody walks down and
(31:07):
they're they're like in a hurry to go to work
or school, and there's this elaborate like a course breakfast
and then some what what what do they always do?
They take like a bite of a waffle or they
are they grab a cup of coffee and they're like, thanks, Han,
you gotta go. It's continental, though, Ben, it's continental. Love
being incontinent. I love being incontinent. Uh No, it's true. Me.
(31:30):
I do like I like sampling the mini muffins. That's
always nice and you know, yeah, I don't want to
be a food waster, but that's where they're MANI you
can just try a few different ones. Let's see which
ones you like. Do you know what I'm talking about though?
With the trope of that huge breakfast and mean just
like in the commercials and commercials always these platters, and
(31:53):
that really is more like a European breakfast, like I mean,
like in Germany and you know other countries in Europe
a lot of times they'll eat a really heavy breakfast
of like sausage and all kinds of crazy stuff. So
that's probably to some degree where the inspiration came from. Um,
I gotta ask, yes quick, this isn't in in the
outline or anything we've talked about directly, but how do
you feel how do you think that the introduction of
(32:15):
like the food pyramid fit into all this? Because if
I'm if I'm reading this correctly, I believe that wasn't
really established until around the seventies, like as kind of, uh,
you know, a response to a lot of this marketing,
you know, like you know, fight marketing with marketing, but
apparently the actual arrangement of the food pyramid isn't quite
(32:37):
right and has changed over the years as well. Yeah,
it's actually it's the food pyramid, or the basis of
it is from Sweden, I believe, and you're right, it's
the nineteen seventies. But I know, uh, there's been a
lot of debate about trade groups and industries having having
their thumb on the scale here because there will be like, um,
(33:01):
there will be pushed back from maybe the meat or
dairy groups, from lobbying lobbying interest in the US, and
they'll say, hey, this is not a good representation of
what we do. Or then there will be a health
group that says, hey, you're playing down the link between
you know, heart disease and eating nothing but hamburgers all
(33:23):
day or whatever. So the food pyramid or healthy eating
pyramid or wherever you call it can be pretty um,
pretty divisive. Might be good for an episode two, I know.
Right now, the food pyramid in the US I think
has been replaced by something called my plate and my
play a little more dynamic, maybe the like accounts individual
(33:47):
body types and dies. Because the original food pyramid, the
whole big, broad base of it is cereal read rice
pasta six to eleven servings. There are folks that would
heavily argue that's a bad idea. And then you got
fruits and vegetables, But a lot of fruits contain a
lot of sugar too, So sometimes probably best to favor
(34:07):
the vegetables and eat the fruits maybe a little more sparingly,
depending you know, on your dietary requirements. But I completely
agree with you Ben that this had to be And
also the food pyramid was introduced in Sweden in the seventies,
but it wasn't introduced in the US until the nineties.
If it's very, very weird, but I think you're right.
It probably is a product of lobbying to a degree
(34:27):
to have that big old foundation of cereal and bread
and pasta, you know, and we're talking about companies with
all these cereal companies that are old. They have a
lot of influence. You know, they were first to market
and they represent a lot of money, and a lot
of lawmakers pay attention to money. Oh yeah, spoiler alert, folks. Uh.
(34:50):
And then if we go a little bit further, we
see something called the Nutrition and Labeling and Education Act
of and this said that all products had to have
that list of nutrition facts, which we're all familiar with. Now.
That's why if you turn around one of these boxes
of cereal, you see the ingredient list and you see
(35:11):
the percentage of the stuff this product contains, and uh,
this this was meant to help people see what they
were putting in their bodies. Uh. This also helped cereal
peak because people still thought of it as a as
breakfast food up until and then apparently it's been on
(35:34):
a bit of a decline since then. I wonder why.
I was just what I can tell you, there's so
many more options and we are just a more in
general health conscious society. Um, whether that actually ends up
in practice or not, I think marketers are hip to it.
And you know, it's a lot harder to market dessert
for breakfast kind of situations. So you really don't see
(35:55):
much community commercials unless you're literally watching kids shows, but
I think our kids channel. But even then, I'm pretty
sure that a lot of that stuff has had to
be paired down or they can't advertise certain benefits or
whatever like they used to. There's one thing we missed
just from the late seventies. UM, I just wanted to
add you mentioned the whole idea of that balanced breakfast
and all of that stuff. In ninety seven, Wheaties claimed
(36:18):
they provided twenty five per cent of your daily vitamin needs.
It also obviously paired that brand with famous sports players,
sports sports ballers, you know, um, and that became again.
We talked about that a little bit the last episode,
sort of like a brand that you wanted to be
associated with, because I mean, I think, of all the cereals,
(36:39):
Wheatie's probably one of the better ones. But I think
there's a little sugar even in wheaties, if I'm not mistaken.
I mean, you eat a wheatie and I taste a
little sweetness, kind of like clinging to those brown flakes.
Four point one grams per point seven five cups. That's
(37:00):
a lot. That's a lot. Let's also consider that serving
size is tricky, okay, so we gotta introduce the bad
things the good things, right, So cereals and a little
bit of a decline, But there are other factors at
(37:21):
play that are influencing this. For a long long time,
I would argue this continues to day. Surfing size portions
were not what we're sold on the box. You would
get a box of you know, like candy or something,
and you wouldn't know unless you looked at it that
this was meant to be multiple servings of that candy
(37:42):
and kind of cereals the same way. But this has
changed due to something we're talking about off air. As
the popularity of cereal declines a little bit, it's also
becoming a prime example for an insidious packaging conspiracy called
shrink flation. Shrink Flation is, uh, the shrink flation is
(38:04):
where you're paying the same price for something, a product
you've probably bought in the past, but you're getting less
of it because of the way it's packaged. Like if
you took this little coffee cup here, uh, and you
looked at the bottom, then the bottom would be higher.
You're paying the same amount for less coffee. And know
you brought up a great point off air that this
(38:26):
has happening a lot with cereal, right, or anything that
needs air and its packaging. It's the perfect candidate because
what's happening is the boxes are getting bigger. It'll be
family size, right, I'll say that on the box. This
is massive box, probably to fill out more space in
the coveted cereal aisle. Again, I'm just kind of like
(38:47):
you know, conjecturing here, but again it comes in a
bag inside that is foot half full of air, and
the actual you know, net weight of the cereal in
that box, while it might be advertised as larger, if
you look at it historically, it's getting smaller. And that's
a very concerted effort on the part of on the
(39:07):
part of these companies to save money. And they also
we should talk about this. Grocery stores are built with
the same level of consideration that goes into making casinos
and uh, serial companies will pay premium rate uh to
have their their boxes placed on certain shelves, you know,
something maybe in the eye line of a six year
(39:29):
old for instance, right absolutely. And you'll also noticed that
like store brands, they don't come in boxes. They just
come in bags straight out. So to even have the
bag in the box is clearly an unnecessary marketing play
in the first place, and it's kind of meant to
disguise how not cute the actual cereal is a uh,
(39:51):
and be how little of it there there might be.
So at this point, UH, I want to give a
big shout out to Harold ball Alzer, who is a
food researcher. At this wonderful conversation with MPR and just
kicks all these crazy facts. One thing he says is
most people take about twelve minutes to eat in the
(40:14):
morning time, and there are easier ways to do that
than eating cereal. Because he's just talking through the mechanics.
He's like, Okay, you have a bowl of cereal. Now
you have a dirty bull you have to clean. Now
you have a dirty spoon. You gotta clean this stuff.
And a lot of times people are just kind of
eating on the go. Uh. If you are sort of
like Max or me, then you're one of the eighteen
(40:35):
percent of Americans who don't eat breakfast. That's an increase
from nine seventy seven when it was just six percent.
And now people are eating like, you know, granola bars,
cereal bars, fast food. Uh. And this has been addressed
by the cereal companies as well. Now they have the
little disposable, single serving cereal packs. I always thought of
(40:56):
those as like airplane cereal. Those are fun. Remember you
get the riety packs and we were kids, those were
hugely popular. And maybe my mom wouldn't buy me a
whole box of fruity pebbles, but she'd buy the variety
pack that just had a couple of fruity pebbles mixed
in with like the quote unquote more healthy cereals. Um.
All this leads me to to ask a question, Uh,
(41:17):
and I don't know if you guys know the answer.
I have a guess, but are people eating breakfast less
in general? And is their research that maybe is determined
that breakfast maybe isn't that most important meal of the
day that we were always kind of sold. Yes, people
are eating at least in the United States, people are
eating breakfast less often in general, like we had that
(41:39):
statistic we just mentioned with going from six percent of
people not even breakfast in seventy seven to not eating
breakfast at all today. As for the second part of
the question, kind of honestly, it depends on your lifestyle.
It depends on you know, do you live in an
agrarian society idea where you're you're eating breakfast and you're
(42:02):
going out and doing demanding physical labor from you know,
until the sun goes down. In that case, then you
probably do want something pretty hearty in the in the
beginning of your day. But then if you're in a
hurry to a place where you don't have a lot
of demanding physical labor, and you can kind of take
a break for a snack when you want. I don't know,
(42:23):
maybe equation changes. I don't think a lot of people
deify breakfast as much as they did in the past. Right,
and and again, you know, this is the kind of
statistic that would have been absolutely red meat for these
serial companies. You know, breakfast the most important meal of
the day. You gotta get your calories in, you know,
first thing. Uh. And and now we're also living in
(42:44):
a time where people are doing more like functional fasting
as well, where they maybe won't eat until dinner like
in that that that works for them. Um, So it
really against depends on who you ask, depends on what
your lifestyle is. Yeah, I mean I haven't eaten breakfast
in years. I don't need to two pm every day.
I do intermedi fasting. And your chipper is a daisy
(43:05):
at all times. Chipper is at whatever you get what
I'm get. Do you drink coffee max? I do I
drink coffee black? Yeah? Okay, it looks like we died
at the same conceptual breakfast club. But yeah, this is
this is pretty interesting because now that we are at
sort of the current the current state of Sereal. What
(43:26):
we can tell you for sure is that it's probably
not going to go away anytime soon. Nostalgia is a
heck of a drug. Also, the marketing folks working for
Cereal companies have a lot of skin in the game.
They've got a lot of experience, they know what works,
and they've shown a pattern of adjusting two different cultural
(43:47):
moments in society. They're even space cereals. That's a real thing. Uh,
it's the regular menu of NASA astronauts. I found that
the they have five or six different kinds. The Cereal
brand checks corn flakes, rice crispies. Oh and weirdly enough,
they also have grits with butter. I don't know what
(44:08):
grits taste like in space. I'm already kind of picky
about them on Earth. I also don't know what grits
tastes like without butter, and I don't want to know. Okay,
I don't want to know. Um, have you heard about
sugar and grits? I still that's a rubiciclon too far
from me. Yeah, I can you know sugary buttery grits?
I I could see the bed it's sort of like
(44:28):
cream of wheat, you know at that point. Uh, And
but no, to me, grits are always meant to be savory.
I like shrimp and grits, you know, or cheese grits,
things like that. The pimento cheese and grits, it's actually
quite good. I'm a recent pimento cheese convert really well. Yeah, well,
because it was just so orange, it always kind of
weirded me out. And the texture is a little odd. Um,
(44:49):
but man on a burger, you know, it actually melts
really nicely. Fantastic. Um. Before we wrap this episode, Uh,
can we talk a little bit about some like maybe
more global breakfast foods and uh, you know, people that
maybe aren't eating cereal. Um, they've got some fun ones here,
and I think I think each of us also brought
some surprises. Yeah what you got, Oh, well, we've got
(45:11):
you know, the Egyptian breakfasts. In ancient egypts peasants and
workers would drink some beer, eat some bread, and eat
a soup um or even onions before they would they
would head out to their slave labor, you know, building
the pyramids or whatever. It's interesting because you know the
concept of the modern American breakfast, or just the idea
(45:34):
of breakfast foods in general, really is a construct of
of advertising. Again thanks to our buddy Edward Burnet's Yeah,
we also know uh that at one point some members
of the clergy felt that breakfast was a sin. That's
the holy breakfast, so you don't eat anything. Dominican priest
(45:59):
Thomas at Unus said that you would be eating too soon,
you would be committing the sin of prey propere. Uh.
So this meant it was to him, was kind of gluttony.
It's like, why why can't you wait? And he was
he was telling people, you need to be like Max Williams,
wait till two pm. That's what That's what he was
saying in the in the thirteenth century. Um. But yeah, well,
(46:23):
and then like in the industrial evolution, when uh, everything
was determined by the workday and often you maybe wouldn't
even get a lunch break, who knows. You had to
kind of take your meals when you could, so loading
up first thing was really kind of the only way
to fly. Um. And they would eat things like anchovies
and oysters, and of course drink tons of wine and ale. Um.
(46:45):
This is all before eleven am. You know, so people
were kind of getting getting blasted and then working in
factories that were very dangerous. Wonder mortality rates were so huge. Also,
water still wasn't as safe as it has become now,
but yeah, there was. They were going hard before noon,
(47:07):
which is still kind of that before noon or before
five is still kind of an arbitrary rule. Right, Are
you guys familiar with the famous Finnish breakfast known as
blue Uru Blue Blue Roots, got the omlad over, the
oh and the oh b l oh that I'm not
familiar with. It is literally a cup of black coffee,
(47:29):
a shot of vodka, and a cigarette. Oh wow, alright, yes,
indeed there's a Reddit page with a picture of it,
and it's literally like on a little sauce for all
three of these items. You know, what I never understood is, uh, well,
I've had it before just because I felt like I
was it was a winning Rome situation. But the full
(47:50):
Irish are the full English breakfast bangers and uh and beans,
so much stuff. And it's so you could get tomatoes, beans, blood, sausage, bacon,
probably some sausage links and eggs and then you'll have
you usually have some toast. Oh you might have mushrooms,
(48:11):
but that's the stuff I see that. It is a lot.
But I will say this, and this is a thing
that I learned from Gordon Ramsey not to every long ago.
If you take tomatoes and mushrooms and you just put
them in a pan on low heat, they kind of
start to cook in their own juices and the tomato
gets a little crinkly, not like sugar crinkles. But that's
(48:32):
sort of the style of of preparing those for a
full English breakfast. The tomatoes that are kind of charred
and uh, really nice because it's like multiple bites. It
is a lot. But I might also go the way
of the sitcom and just eat a little bit here
and there and kind of, you know, compose some perfect
bites and then move on. I personally love a nice breakfast,
but usually only on the weekend. You know. Yeah, I'll
(48:54):
cook breakfast on on a weekend. But the way that
I cook is very slow and considered and oh what
do we have here? Very well? Uh so I'm usually
if I start cooking breakfast, it's to be charitable. We
called a brunch. One of my last breakfast shoutouts the Netherlands,
(49:14):
there's this thing called hoggle slog Uh. It's a slice
of bread that has chocolate sprinkles on it. Have you
guys heard of this? No? Please, No, that's it. That's
I didn't believe it. I thought they have butter so
the sprinkles don't fall off. But yeah, that's it. That's
literally it. And somehow it has less gramps of sugar
(49:37):
with that somehow. Yes, but this is a I think
we should also do an episode just about breakfast, because
that is such a uniquely different thing. You know, it's
it's always weird. Like you go to uh, you know,
you just walk by different, um different like regionally specific restaurants,
(49:57):
and you see that not all of them served some
kind of breakfas this dish. Right, Like, the idea of
what people in China might eat for breakfast isn't something
that's really caught on in the United States, at least
in the parts I've I've visited. And that's what kind
of was getting out earlier. I sometimes like eat a
bowl of ramen for breakfast with like a poached egg
in it, you know, or just leftovers. I really I
(50:19):
kind of resent being held to the standard of what
is and is not a breakfast food or what time
those types of food should be consumed. I like to
to live live on the edge. Have you guys, Uh,
last one for me? Have you guys heard of Welsh
rabbit or Welsh rabbits y? Yeah? Yeah, it contains neither
Welsh nor rabbits Um. It is a piece of toast
(50:42):
with kind of a cheesy um gravy kind of melt
concoction over it, often served with a poach egg. And
anyone who's a Paul Thomas Anderson fan will remember that
Daniel Lee Lewis's character from Phantom Thread orders breakfast with
bacon SCons, butter cream jam, a pot of lap saying
su chong t and some sausages and an order of
(51:05):
Welsh rare bit with a poached egg not too running.
The poached egg not too running. We are going to
call it a day. They are all sorts of breakfast
is that we want to talk about. And I think
part of it is because, uh, outside of maximal, I
don't know about you know, but I might be getting hungry.
I might have a little bit of a nausha head.
(51:26):
Get that daytime bagel, daytime bagel, No more two am
bagels for me. Guys, this is the beginning of a
whole new era, and we hope that you join us
and give us your thoughts about breakfast around the world.
This is when that's gonna be pretty exciting for us
in the meantime. Thanks as always to our super producer
(51:47):
and research associate for this week series, Mr Max Williams.
Thanks to Jonathan Strickland. I actually talked with Jonathan just
very briefly through uh through text. I was between so
I was trying to prank text him and I didn't
know if it was his number or if it was
someone else on my phone, but it is his number.
(52:07):
He sends his regards. I don't know whether they're warm
regards or like cold sinister regards. He said he is
looking forward to joining us soon, So the rumors are true.
We are in contact. Don't tempt me with a good time,
ben Okay. Well, Instead, what I'm saying is the Quister
might show up. Yeah, We've been teasing that for for
like a year. And where is he? Where is this Quister?
(52:30):
I don't believe he exists anymore, And this would be
the exact opportunity moment for him to pop up. If
we weren't already an hour into this podcast, we wouldn't
do that to you ridiculous historians. But yeah, I don't know,
weld we tried. I mean really, I'm actually kind of
blown away by how much there was to talk about
regarding the history of cereal. But it also kind of
makes so much sense because it's really tied in with
(52:51):
a lot of different threads, you know, from history, in
terms of like the kind of holistic health food movement,
marketing too cartoon characters to breakfast foods, and I mean,
it's just I don't know, it's a whole ball of ax,
and it's been a pleasure discussing it with you fellas. Yes,
agreed and likewise, So tune in next week, folks. We're
(53:12):
gonna be exploring some even more bizarre, strange tales of
yesteryear that won't have They won't be related to cereal,
I think, but if they are, we'll bring some props.
We'll eat some cereal while we do while we do
our next episodes. Huge thanks to christophrostiotis here in spirit,
(53:32):
Eves Jeff Coat gallivanting around this wide world of sports
doing great work, and gosh, do you Max and and
uh and of course to you Benjamin, Thank you mill
and Jamin uh. And of course big thanks to all
those wonderful Cereal mascots except for that Crinkles guy. We'll
see you, nice set, folks. For more podcasts from I
(54:00):
Heeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:27):
back to the show Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always
so much for tuning in. This is part two of
a continuing history of Breakfast Cereal, So if you have
not heard part one, you might not be totally lost,
but you will enjoy this on a deeper level. Uh,
I think that's fair to say. Always. Yeah, Ben, I
(00:50):
have to tell you, Um, I'm Noll by the way,
and you're Ben. The first part of this series, you
opened the show by asking Max and myself whether we
had eaten cereal for breakfast or you know, any kind
of breakfast cereal. I come to you today having not
eaten breakfast cereal exactly, but I did eat French toast sticks.
(01:10):
I don't know if anyone's familiar with this innovation. They
come in sticks now pre sticks, and uh you just
pop them in the ove him and boy howdy are
those things delightful and they don't feel for some reason
the stick for makes it feel as though it's not
as heavy as either regular French toast, which maybe just
a complete Jedi mind trick. But as we'll find out today,
(01:33):
cereal is full of those breakfast foods is an industry,
you know, from Bacon on down. Big shout out to
our super producer, Mr Max Williams. Max or French toast
sticks new to you. I mean I don't really eat
anything breakfast at all. I mean I've had them before,
but I mean they're cool invention. The only breakfast I
will eat is bagels and locks. That's about it. It's
(01:54):
pretty great. Yeah, I'm it's it's amazing. I'm on the
road and I almost got some almost at a bagel
and Locks when I got in when I blew into
town at a twenty four hour gets hype place. But it, uh,
I think I might have a new like rule for myself.
I don't think I should get bagels at like two
(02:16):
am from a place that's open, not exclusively as a diner.
They were selling lots of stuff, you know. You speaking
of diners, By the way, do you know what the
criteria for a diner is. I just found this out recently.
It just has to have like an open kitchen and
a bar with seats, and mainly they're known for serving
(02:37):
breakfast food all day. But specifically that's the main criteria
for something being considered a diner. Then that explains why
a lot of things could be called diners in general.
You know, there was that kind of a there was
that fad where you would see people go to juice bars,
like juice diners and oxygen gin bars. Um. Yeah, now
(03:02):
that that seems like a good grift, but it still
has nothing on cereal. When we left off in our
previous episode, we teased one of our favorite, um weirdest
aspects of the modern breakfast cereal game, which is of
course the marketing, the merchandizing, the mascots. You know, it's like, look,
(03:24):
a lot of this stuff became geared for children and
started out often as a food of convenience or even
more importantly, a purported health food, and then they started
realizing that if you wanted to get the sale done,
if you wanted to get that box into the shopping
cart and into the into the household kitchen, you needed
(03:48):
the kids on your side. This is something that old
dirty Bastard would point out famously in Wu Tang, Right,
Wu Tang is for the kids, and breakfast cereal is
for the kids if you want to make a profit.
And that's why, uh in nineteen o nine Kellogg's that
we talked to a lot about Previously, they introduced the
(04:09):
first ever Cereal Box prize, and this happened at the
same time that the the covers of these boxes were
getting more and more interesting and marketing increasingly towards children.
Do you guys remember Cereal box prizes? That that was
the only time I would like hang with Cereal as
(04:32):
a kid, because I knew there was stuff at the
bottom of the bag. Yeah, And it was always one
of those kind of like disappointing kind of things where
like it was more about the expectation than it was
about what you actually got when you got to the bottom.
And then they started doing this clever thing, or maybe
it was the other way around, where you wouldn't actually
get the thing in the box. You'd get like you'd
(04:53):
have to mail in box tops or there'd be some
kind of little coupon. It reminds me of like the
Dakota Ring and Crackers acts, you know from from a
Christmas story. He didn't actually get the thing right away,
he had to mail in a bunch of like box
there was a ton actually to get the Dakota Ring,
and then it was all just a marketing ploy in
and of itself, which has I think we talked about
(05:15):
that in an episode of Ridiculous History. I'm pretty certain,
um basically about ovalte. Yeah, that's right, that's the chocolate
e mineral based drink. And again, you know, let's go
back to our buddy John Harvey Kellogg, who initially, you know,
was trying to promote healthy, clean living, and then his
brother kind of took that whole concept and ran with it, besmirching,
(05:36):
honestly the legacy of his brother by you know, having
kind of sugary cereals. Originally, serial companies like Kellogg didn't
really see the value in marketing directly to kids, but
then it became pretty clear, relatively quickly, like I think
by the early nineteen hundreds, uh, that this was absolutely
the way to go. This is the play. I mean,
(05:58):
they also did. Let's let's talk about that first prize
for kids in Cereal. You had to buy not one,
but two boxes of corn flakes. And like you said, no,
they had to prove they had purchased these, either through
sending something in the mail or going directly to the
grocery store where they bought these. And if you could
(06:20):
prove you bought two boxes of corn flakes. You got
a book like a pamphlet called the Funny Jungle Land
Moving Pictures Booklet, And this this is something that all
other cereal makers paid attention to. By the time you
get to the middle of the twentie century, especially in
post war years, you see that advertisers have kind of
(06:43):
taken parents out of the equation. Parents are a footnote.
They're relegated to something like this is part of a
balanced breakfast, or this is nutrition. The rest of the
ads are all gonna be about look at these great
bears get big yellow on the corn pops, or look
at this really creepy clown who wants to sell you
(07:05):
sugar crisp. That was especially traumatic. Yeah, he just showed
it to to Max and I, uh, first thing in
the morning before we recorded, and I think we were
both somewhat sugar. Can we hear a little clip of
this monstrosity and just picture the absolute creepiest clown you
could possibly imagine, emerging from a chicken coop kind of that.
(07:26):
Then he stands up and rips through this backdrop made
of paper, uh, and then proceeds to sit down at
this little table and give us the spield take us
from Corincle. That's the best breakfast under the Big Top
is post sugar rice corrinkles so correctly, so delicious, so different.
Each grain of rice and sugar rice wrinkles. It's currinkled
(07:49):
with honey and sugar. So what you could what if
we walk you through this? Yeah, you can see the
guy burst through the uh the weird paper screen and
he's got what Stephen King is called double zero kind
of serial killer eyes all all, there's no real pupil iris.
(08:12):
They just kind of suck you in his makeup because deadlights, Yeah, deadlights,
just makeup. Because it's a black and white ad spot.
It all looks like his face is white and black
and I don't know, it looks like he if he
opened his mouth and just held it open, blood or
ichor would seep out of it. It's it's weird. It's
(08:34):
because of the the you know, honestly, it's it's beautifully
filmed in a lot of ways, but because of the
contrast of those blacks are so black and the whites
are so white, and then the separation from the foreground
the background are really well done. But you're right, because
of how black the makeup like around his mouth is
it looks like how you think of like blood and
like psycho or something. And we're from the post gay
(08:57):
sy world, so our that's the film troll and uderstanding
of clowns is way different. Anyway, people loved all these mascots,
aside from I know we went out of our way
to show you the spooky Why we're gonna talk about
some more, but when we um, when we're talking about commercials,
I want to give a shout out to Sugar Crisp.
This commercial was a game changer. It's the first animated
(09:19):
TV commercial in the world of Cereal and as three bears, Handy, Dandy,
and Candy, and years later these guys would all be
kind of consolidated into the singular sugar Bear. Uh. Yeah,
I think I made the slightly of off color comment
(09:41):
that sugar Bear looks like he's maybe a little under
the influence. Um most definitely did that, Yeah, but I
think I took it a little further, like he's he
looks like you would kind of picture some sort of
jazz junkie, you know, Like I mean, he's just got
these like really barely open eyes, but he doesn't seem
like high on on jazz cigarettes. He seems more like
(10:04):
he's on on the on the stuff. Oh I remember
this guy. Yeah, yeah, very lack of jasicle, you know,
like always wearing long sleeves. I'm saying, no, no, no,
bear sleeves. That's not true. You can't find pictures of
him in more of a chill T shirt summer outfit.
(10:25):
But but if you you know, we're applying adult mindsets
to these cartoons, and in many cases, when you're a kid,
these just seem really cool. You're buying the idea as
much as you're buying the food. Uh. There was I
think it was cookie crisp, I want to say had
(10:47):
right there. It was a cop there's a cop and
and a rabid dog kind of and yeah, and then
there was of course, we know all all the big
ones named the monster pant On with Chocola and Frank
and Barry and um yummy mummy is that one of them? Yeah?
And now that's the thing that they released for the
(11:08):
nostalgia play, you know, right around the right around the
spooky seasons. Yeah, just like what do you call it?
Just like Ecto plasma coolers when those got re released
by High Sea or something we also see that Sugar
Crisp is a pioneer and focusing on children. Roy Rogers,
(11:31):
who had this very popular TV show in his day,
started telling cutting parents out of the equation almost entirely
and talking directly to kids in his TV show. He
would say, ask your mom to get a package of
our favorite cereal post Sugar Crisp. They were moving boxes
and other other companies didn't want to be left behind.
(11:53):
Kelloggs makes corn pops in nineteen fifty two, they come
back with frosted flakes. Trick is way older than I
had thought it was. It's from nineteen fifty four, and uh,
you know, it's weird because we talked a lot about
the role of sugar in you know, it's insidious in
the modern West. But I wasn't aware of this back
(12:16):
in the day in the nineteen fifties. Especially the amount
of sugar in these things came was advertised as a bonus.
It was a plus, like you don't have to add sugar.
We had talked about that kind in the last episode.
It's just I think the research just wasn't there, you know,
on some of the long term health effects of eating
(12:36):
too much sugar, not to mention with children, and then
we start to see you know, rising cases of things
like childhood diabetes, and I bet you could draw a
line directly to you know, among other things, you know,
like sugary snacks and such, but to breakfast cereals and
on all this marketing that we're talking about. Um, you know,
this obviously continued and just kind of kept at at
(12:58):
a fever pace up until today. I mean, I guess
we don't really Most of the cereal mascots that we
see today are some future iteration of a legacy one,
you know that kind of started in this golden age
of cereal mascots. You don't see a lot of new
cereals launched. It's usually some new flavor of rice crispies,
it's got some movie tie in, or you know, I think, uh,
(13:19):
what what is it? Frosted Flakes has like an Avatar
tie in, where like Tony the Tigers like went dressed
in Avatar gear, but they didn't make him blue weirdly.
But we also see some kind of more drastic, let's say,
evolution of some of these mascots. In the seventies, Uh,
Lucky Charms was wrapped not by Lucky the lepre con
but by Waldo the Wizard um and the the famous
(13:43):
catchphrase they're magically delicious wasn't a thing. Waldo referred to
Lucky Charms as being you see, if I can't even
do this able dibibble delicious delicious about that? That's a mouthful.
That's like a super califragilistic Crinkle's territory. Man, I don't
mean I don't love it. Are we surprised that didn't
(14:03):
catch on? Uh? It's still wubba lubba dub dub dub.
But a big reason that Lucky one out was because
of market testing. So like I mean, they're doing these
characters in the same way that you know movies are focused,
group tested and things like that. They actually get like
kids in a room to respond to see which one
(14:23):
they respond to more. And while Waldo went out of inch,
you know, at first, Lucky came down and uh and
destroyed him, totally erased him from history because of the stereotypes, right,
who does good stereotype? That's a good point. Yeah, but
been weirdly, you know, he's still around today. They've kind
of you know, they don't really do as many I
(14:43):
don't have cable, so I don't really know if if
if I'm missing something, but I don't see as many
Lucky Charms ads, you know with the leprechn Lucky the
leprechn doing kind of a full, you know, stereotypical Irish lilt.
Uh yeah, you know. The literally the only thing I've
seen that references Lucky Charms at all in recent years
(15:04):
is a parody from uh, from Rick and Morty from
Interdimensional Cable, where they have a have a very not
charming serial commercial and it's it's that's right. Yeah, I
do remember that one. Well, is it okay? Is it?
Is it cannibalism? Though now I want to I'll be clear.
(15:25):
I'm not condoning the actions of those children, but is
a leper con to be taken as human or is it?
Or is it more like eating um a related promiscrats? Yeah? Well, actually,
if I remember correctly, which I do remember correctly, they're
not actually eating the leper con, but they're trying to
get the cereal out of the leprech, So it is
(15:47):
not cannibalism. It's just I mean there's sex on there
at that point. Yeah. Yeah, people listening to this right now,
so you know, exactly gas. But I mean, you know,
we have ones that we know, like Lucky the Leprechaun,
(16:10):
Tony the Tiger, which actually debut Beckett in the early
nineteen fifties. And I'm just guessing here, but I have
a feeling that Tony got buffer and buffer and buffer
as time went on, as the original Tony was more
like a tiger the tiger kind of slinky fellow. And
then uh started started definitely juicing and uh we again,
(16:32):
you know, there's still information about uh nutritional benefits for
the parents who are going to read the back of
the label or they're gonna see a splash that says,
you know, with all your daily iron or fiber or
potassium or whatever. It seems there was this trend for
focusing on a couple of nutritional benefits. But this again,
(16:55):
like we teased earlier, kind of goes to the wayside.
Through the sixties, cereal boxes are tall can less about
the benefits that were touted during the days of granula,
and more about the taste, the fun, the flavor now
with more berries, you know what I mean. And uh,
(17:15):
they didn't need to convince people that you should eat
cereal in the morning because that had already become part
of culture, at least in the United States, so it
was a foregone conclusion. People would say, Oh, yeah, it's morning,
I've got a kid. I gotta get some milk. I
gotta get some cereal. That's how we do things. And
so now the now the industry is in this really cool,
(17:39):
weird place where they can say, Okay, we know everybody
needs cereal. Now we just need to help you figure
out which one to buy, and we can add all
kinds of bells and whistles for that purpose. Yeah, and
and the message kind of pivoted away from nutrition and
toward like pep, you know what I mean, Like it
gives you energy. It gives you the energy to take
(18:01):
on the day, even if you're a little kid. And
you know you mentioned, uh. The idea of marketing these
things is being fun as being like experiential, Like if
you eat the lepre con cereal, you're basically a leprechn
at this point, you know, eating frosted flakes is going
to turn you into a cartoon tiger, at least from within. Um,
it's like anamorphous kind of situation on swivel. It's an
(18:22):
adventure to eat tricks because you gotta you gotta go
quick and make sure that rabbit doesn't sneak around and
try to pull a heist. Yeah, and that rabbits on
drugs too. By the way, just for for the record,
they're in some sort of magical fairy land. That I
believe is that it's either the children have accidentally eaten
some mushrooms that they shouldn't have in the woods, you know,
and they're hallucinating this whole experience. That's just my uh,
(18:44):
it's just my my back story. Um. But yeah, I
mean think you started seeing things like, you know, coco pebbles,
which were now we're Coco pebbles always tied in with
the flint Stones because the flint stones are old. So
I mean I kind of think that probably cocoa and
fruity pebbles were always a television high end from the start. Yeah,
the flint Stones did exist before, well before the Post
(19:07):
Company started making pebble varieties of food like cocoa pebbles
or fruity pebbles. But I also want to say, and
I don't wanna, I don't want to flip any wigs
over ahead of Barbara, but the Flintstones were always kind
of sellouts, right, Like they did smoking ads back in
the day. I can't remember which brand of cigarette it was,
(19:29):
but they were all about it. Right. Early flint Stone
cartoons were in black and white, and they occupied a
lot of the same space as you know, those kind
of like, uh, those craft theater kind of shows. You
know that we're spotting that we're totally sponsored whole hog
by a brand. And that was really the only reason
some of these shows existed in the first place, you know,
it was to sell the products. I mean, that's always
(19:50):
kind of how television has been. It wasn't like, Okay,
we're gonna put out amazing art and then maybe sell
some ads. It's now, we're gonna sell some ads, and
we have to put something around the ads. So we're
gonna call that television, right, And so I looked it up.
It is Winston Cigarettes. As they also did beer commercials
as well, which is really kind of you know, it's
kind of a jarred here system because we think of
(20:11):
The Flintstones very much as a children's show, but it's
like get your cigarettes and your beer. Well the parents
were watching too, right, But also the flint Stones was
kind of a cartoon um equivalent of like the Honeymooners.
So it really was kind of built around these very
adult tropes and they were like, you know, marital disputes
and things like that, only surrounded by like you know,
(20:34):
animals that served as household appliances. Yeah, and so we
see that the Coco Pebbles, which is kind of a
new iteration of sugar crisp, is the first cereal that
is made as a kind of merchandizing spinoff of a
TV show. It's made from the Flintstones and the as
(20:56):
We're Winston cigarettes Kitty Winston cigarettes not related. Flintston has
just did a very poor taste add for them. They
also said, look, kids, don't just think of our fun
and frolick e mascots. Think of all the cool stuff
we can do. It's cooler than the cereal that your
frenzied at school. We can coat things with different bright colors,
fruity pebbles. We can add freeze dried fruit or marshmallows,
(21:20):
things that look like fruit. We can make them different shapes,
you know, just like fruit snacks would be later with
gushers and fruit by the foot and so on, And
with the sugar thing because again, people didn't know how
bad sugar could be. Uh, it gives you energy, so
they're kind of advertising this thing that's a five hour
energy drink, a red Bull um, a a rave aesthetic, right,
(21:45):
and then it comes with a cool anthropomorphic animal cartoon
that you can hang out with and will approve of
you us. But it's like, on every level, this is
really brilliant. Oh and then you participate the prices, you
could win stuff, You could enter sweep steaks like we
(22:06):
mentioned with wheaties, you could feel like you were in
some way interacting with the celebrity or athlete that that
you loved and looked up to. UM. And then we
talked about grape nuts. I I feel like we should go.
There were adult cereals. It wasn't all for kids. You
mentioned grape nuts. That just reminded me to mention Sir
grape Fellow, which is not a serial that's familiar with,
(22:29):
but it was kind of in that same kind of
marketed to children's product line. And by the way, last thing,
cocoa pebbles and fruity pebbles were actually repurposed Rice crenkles. Yeah,
this is fascinating, and you know we could spend know
you mentioned we're before recording today, we could spend so
much time just do eight episodes about individual cereal mascots.
(22:52):
It's surprising how many might be unfamiliar to us today,
but we're a huge deal in their time. There's this
guy named Uh, Big Yellow whose job was just to
sell you sugar corn pops. And if you look at him,
he was in a lot of stuff. If you look
at him, he's just a semi ridiculous blonde man with
(23:13):
a big chin and a huge that looks to be
a sixties seventy gallon hat and it kind of looks
like the Curious George Dad. Yeah. Yeah, man with a
big yellow hat. And it does appear that you can
get Big Yellow as a funko pop figure. Yeah. It
looks like kellogg is leaning into this nostalgia, you know, play,
(23:35):
as they do with so many other things. And I
believe that that sugar corn pops is maybe now just
corn pops, and you dropped the sugar from the name,
but it looks like the same little nuggets. Yeah, and
then he got Big Yellow got Uh. His whole thing
was he's so rich that he's core pops. I guess
it looks like an oil magnetor yeah, like some sort
(23:57):
of like he's got life on the range. He's like,
I'm drilling, drilling for black gold. And then he got
he got replaced, he get phased out and replaced with
a porcupine. But maybe he's still out there doing things
in a big yellow style. All right, we're working live,
moving on. Uh. The the thing you need to know
(24:18):
is that there were still healthy or there were still
cereals marketing themselves as healthy wheaties, corn flakes, grape nuts,
all kinds of things with brand in the title, and
they talked about you know, you'd see diet fads reflected
in cereal. So if you were counting calories, you'd see
(24:38):
the advertisements coming out that said, uh, this has you
don't just blank number of calories and all you need
is and there's a lot of stuff about one bowl.
One bowl contains of your daily you know, requirements of
blah blah blah. Remember um, there's a great Saturday at
Live commercial about that about the fiber the fiber pyramid.
Do you guys remember that one? Now it's or colon
(25:00):
blow Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, Yeah, that's that's exactly it.
Thank you. Yeah, check out the Colon blow commercial if
you want a sense of how far this. Oh yeah,
I know you're talking about one of my favorite, uh
in terms of just like the most bland sounding kind
of adult cereals that are like meant so that's the thing.
(25:21):
It's sort of fractured or there was not a backlash exactly,
but they realize, oh, we can also sell this to,
you know, to adults like we did in the early days,
so that things like Basic four by General Mills. It's
literally just like you know, oat flakes with nuts and
vanilla clusters, and I almost guarantee you has the same
amount of sugar in it as some of those kids cereals.
(25:44):
It's all a grift, man, Oh I'm sure. Yeah. And
then people said, you know, cereal doesn't always have to
be a breakfast food. You could also be a snack
you're on the goat, you're on a hike, you're on
a trip with the kids, or you can make it
more than just a meal by itself. You can use
it in recipes. This was very clever because they wanted
(26:07):
to get past that, they wanted to expand past that
association with breakfast so you would see things like the
Cheerios recipe booklet. Crushed them up, use them like bread crumbs,
use them to bread pork chops or um what what are?
They're all kinds of crushed cereal toppings in cakes and
sweet snow too. Right, Yeah, I guess the one that
(26:28):
comes to mind immediately is Rice Crispy Treats, because you know,
it's sort of like, um, how Elmer's Glue has kind
of like figured out how to rebrand to be not
no longer really a glue company, but a slime making company,
you know, so they sell all these kids that are
literally just glue and glitter and like whatever the other
ingredients you need to think it's some kind of soap
(26:48):
to make the slime that the kids used to be
super into. I don't know if that fat is still around,
but yeah, Rice Crispy is you know how to figure
it out? They they sold you like a family activity, right,
making Rice Crispy treats with the kids, sort of like
Jello jigglers. Remember those It was literally just jello that
you cut out with a cookie cutter. Therefore, now it's
(27:09):
a whole other thing they can market with the same
exact stuff. But then you started getting pre made those
cereal bar as you're talking about, and Rice Crispy treats,
you know, pre packers. That's a little more of a
modern innovation. We'll get to that. Yeah, And I gotta say,
you know what, I just never got into Rice Crispy treats.
I don't have too much of a sweet tooth. But
people love them, love them, I think to me, they've
(27:31):
always just felt like a let down snack, like when
you get a fruit cup and it's mostly melon, you
know what I mean. You can't stand them. It's like, honey, dude,
It's like, why is that one candle unservice to a party?
It thinks they can bring his dumbass friend, honey do along.
You don't get a plus one candle up? More like
honey don't? Am I Right? But but we were, we
(27:53):
were teasing the modern era a little bits, and you know,
the things were kind of in flux, right, and then
it all kind of even out, Like I only haven't
been too many serial innovations that we could speak of
or like again, new cereals, new exciting serial brands. A
lot of it was just kind of repurposed and tweaked
marketing campaigns for existing brands. But by the seventies and
(28:14):
eighties they were really kind of playing against the whole
sugar thing, like removing the words sugar from sugar pops
and stuff like that, because we did start to see
research and again this rise in childhood obesity and uh
diabetes and things like that that were of concern. Um.
And even in the early seventies, we had folks like
dr Atkins, you know of the Afkins diet fame, talking
(28:37):
about how carbs were bad for you, and what is
serial if not just a big old bowl of carbs, right,
just like just like the early days of the granula paste. Uh,
this this stuff was this was kind of a reckoning, right,
Those greens did not look as healthy anymore. People started
to question some of the more out there health claims
(29:00):
from cereals of yesteryear, and they started saying, hey, there's
also just a uh, there's so much sugar in this
that it might not look like a bowl of cake,
but in some situations, am I feeding my kid and
myself a bowl of cake? So healthy cereals doubled down.
They say, we got all the vitamins, we got all
(29:20):
the protein, the fiber, what whatever you are seeking my
grocery store, sojourner, you have found it in this box.
Sugar crisps gets renamed golden crisp. This is also what
we see a lot of people pulling sugar out of
the sugar corn pops corn pops now and because like
you said, it used to be almost a selling point,
(29:41):
so they wanted to highlight that, and now they kind
of wanted to hide it. And they probably did, you know,
reduce the amount of sugar from those early just you know,
knock your socks off levels. But certainly sugar is still
part of the equation because that's the whole point. It's
supposed to taste good, it's supposed to taste sweet. And
then we get to something very clever. This is very
(30:01):
Edward Burnet's style. They know they're still there's still a
viable market in selling sugar to kids in the morning, right.
They know they can still sell that stuff all the time,
and there might be some adults who are buying it
just because they've been eating it themselves for years. But
they knew they had to fight back against the sugar thing,
the health concerns, which are very valid. This is where
(30:24):
we see the introduction of the balanced breakfast or the
complete breakfast that becomes the balanced breakfast. They say, okay,
we can't just keep telling these people you can eat
cinnamon toast crunch and you'll be absolutely fine, and that
it's healthy for you to do that every day of
your life. But we can say it's healthy as part
(30:45):
of a larger breakfast orange juice, fruit, milk, maybe some eggs,
if you throw a bowl of cereal in. The companies
are still making money, but it also seems less egregious
for the consumer. That's brilliant. And I imagine this around
the same time we started seeing that trope of um
of sitcom and movie fame where somebody walks down and
(31:07):
they're they're like in a hurry to go to work
or school, and there's this elaborate like a course breakfast
and then some what what what do they always do?
They take like a bite of a waffle or they
are they grab a cup of coffee and they're like, thanks, Han,
you gotta go. It's continental, though, Ben, it's continental. Love
being incontinent. I love being incontinent. Uh No, it's true. Me.
(31:30):
I do like I like sampling the mini muffins. That's
always nice and you know, yeah, I don't want to
be a food waster, but that's where they're MANI you
can just try a few different ones. Let's see which
ones you like. Do you know what I'm talking about though?
With the trope of that huge breakfast and mean just
like in the commercials and commercials always these platters, and
(31:53):
that really is more like a European breakfast, like I mean,
like in Germany and you know other countries in Europe
a lot of times they'll eat a really heavy breakfast
of like sausage and all kinds of crazy stuff. So
that's probably to some degree where the inspiration came from. Um,
I gotta ask, yes quick, this isn't in in the
outline or anything we've talked about directly, but how do
you feel how do you think that the introduction of
(32:15):
like the food pyramid fit into all this? Because if
I'm if I'm reading this correctly, I believe that wasn't
really established until around the seventies, like as kind of, uh,
you know, a response to a lot of this marketing,
you know, like you know, fight marketing with marketing, but
apparently the actual arrangement of the food pyramid isn't quite
(32:37):
right and has changed over the years as well. Yeah,
it's actually it's the food pyramid, or the basis of
it is from Sweden, I believe, and you're right, it's
the nineteen seventies. But I know, uh, there's been a
lot of debate about trade groups and industries having having
their thumb on the scale here because there will be like, um,
(33:01):
there will be pushed back from maybe the meat or
dairy groups, from lobbying lobbying interest in the US, and
they'll say, hey, this is not a good representation of
what we do. Or then there will be a health
group that says, hey, you're playing down the link between
you know, heart disease and eating nothing but hamburgers all
(33:23):
day or whatever. So the food pyramid or healthy eating
pyramid or wherever you call it can be pretty um,
pretty divisive. Might be good for an episode two, I know.
Right now, the food pyramid in the US I think
has been replaced by something called my plate and my
play a little more dynamic, maybe the like accounts individual
(33:47):
body types and dies. Because the original food pyramid, the
whole big, broad base of it is cereal read rice
pasta six to eleven servings. There are folks that would
heavily argue that's a bad idea. And then you got
fruits and vegetables, But a lot of fruits contain a
lot of sugar too, So sometimes probably best to favor
(34:07):
the vegetables and eat the fruits maybe a little more sparingly,
depending you know, on your dietary requirements. But I completely
agree with you Ben that this had to be And
also the food pyramid was introduced in Sweden in the seventies,
but it wasn't introduced in the US until the nineties.
If it's very, very weird, but I think you're right.
It probably is a product of lobbying to a degree
(34:27):
to have that big old foundation of cereal and bread
and pasta, you know, and we're talking about companies with
all these cereal companies that are old. They have a
lot of influence. You know, they were first to market
and they represent a lot of money, and a lot
of lawmakers pay attention to money. Oh yeah, spoiler alert, folks. Uh.
(34:50):
And then if we go a little bit further, we
see something called the Nutrition and Labeling and Education Act
of and this said that all products had to have
that list of nutrition facts, which we're all familiar with. Now.
That's why if you turn around one of these boxes
of cereal, you see the ingredient list and you see
(35:11):
the percentage of the stuff this product contains, and uh,
this this was meant to help people see what they
were putting in their bodies. Uh. This also helped cereal
peak because people still thought of it as a as
breakfast food up until and then apparently it's been on
(35:34):
a bit of a decline since then. I wonder why.
I was just what I can tell you, there's so
many more options and we are just a more in
general health conscious society. Um, whether that actually ends up
in practice or not, I think marketers are hip to it.
And you know, it's a lot harder to market dessert
for breakfast kind of situations. So you really don't see
(35:55):
much community commercials unless you're literally watching kids shows, but
I think our kids channel. But even then, I'm pretty
sure that a lot of that stuff has had to
be paired down or they can't advertise certain benefits or
whatever like they used to. There's one thing we missed
just from the late seventies. UM, I just wanted to
add you mentioned the whole idea of that balanced breakfast
and all of that stuff. In ninety seven, Wheaties claimed
(36:18):
they provided twenty five per cent of your daily vitamin needs.
It also obviously paired that brand with famous sports players,
sports sports ballers, you know, um, and that became again.
We talked about that a little bit the last episode,
sort of like a brand that you wanted to be
associated with, because I mean, I think, of all the cereals,
(36:39):
Wheatie's probably one of the better ones. But I think
there's a little sugar even in wheaties, if I'm not mistaken.
I mean, you eat a wheatie and I taste a
little sweetness, kind of like clinging to those brown flakes.
Four point one grams per point seven five cups. That's
(37:00):
a lot. That's a lot. Let's also consider that serving
size is tricky, okay, so we gotta introduce the bad
things the good things, right, So cereals and a little
bit of a decline, But there are other factors at
(37:21):
play that are influencing this. For a long long time,
I would argue this continues to day. Surfing size portions
were not what we're sold on the box. You would
get a box of you know, like candy or something,
and you wouldn't know unless you looked at it that
this was meant to be multiple servings of that candy
(37:42):
and kind of cereals the same way. But this has
changed due to something we're talking about off air. As
the popularity of cereal declines a little bit, it's also
becoming a prime example for an insidious packaging conspiracy called
shrink flation. Shrink Flation is, uh, the shrink flation is
(38:04):
where you're paying the same price for something, a product
you've probably bought in the past, but you're getting less
of it because of the way it's packaged. Like if
you took this little coffee cup here, uh, and you
looked at the bottom, then the bottom would be higher.
You're paying the same amount for less coffee. And know
you brought up a great point off air that this
(38:26):
has happening a lot with cereal, right, or anything that
needs air and its packaging. It's the perfect candidate because
what's happening is the boxes are getting bigger. It'll be
family size, right, I'll say that on the box. This
is massive box, probably to fill out more space in
the coveted cereal aisle. Again, I'm just kind of like
(38:47):
you know, conjecturing here, but again it comes in a
bag inside that is foot half full of air, and
the actual you know, net weight of the cereal in
that box, while it might be advertised as larger, if
you look at it historically, it's getting smaller. And that's
a very concerted effort on the part of on the
(39:07):
part of these companies to save money. And they also
we should talk about this. Grocery stores are built with
the same level of consideration that goes into making casinos
and uh, serial companies will pay premium rate uh to
have their their boxes placed on certain shelves, you know,
something maybe in the eye line of a six year
(39:29):
old for instance, right absolutely. And you'll also noticed that
like store brands, they don't come in boxes. They just
come in bags straight out. So to even have the
bag in the box is clearly an unnecessary marketing play
in the first place, and it's kind of meant to
disguise how not cute the actual cereal is a uh,
(39:51):
and be how little of it there there might be.
So at this point, UH, I want to give a
big shout out to Harold ball Alzer, who is a
food researcher. At this wonderful conversation with MPR and just
kicks all these crazy facts. One thing he says is
most people take about twelve minutes to eat in the
(40:14):
morning time, and there are easier ways to do that
than eating cereal. Because he's just talking through the mechanics.
He's like, Okay, you have a bowl of cereal. Now
you have a dirty bull you have to clean. Now
you have a dirty spoon. You gotta clean this stuff.
And a lot of times people are just kind of
eating on the go. Uh. If you are sort of
like Max or me, then you're one of the eighteen
(40:35):
percent of Americans who don't eat breakfast. That's an increase
from nine seventy seven when it was just six percent.
And now people are eating like, you know, granola bars,
cereal bars, fast food. Uh. And this has been addressed
by the cereal companies as well. Now they have the
little disposable, single serving cereal packs. I always thought of
(40:56):
those as like airplane cereal. Those are fun. Remember you
get the riety packs and we were kids, those were
hugely popular. And maybe my mom wouldn't buy me a
whole box of fruity pebbles, but she'd buy the variety
pack that just had a couple of fruity pebbles mixed
in with like the quote unquote more healthy cereals. Um.
All this leads me to to ask a question, Uh,
(41:17):
and I don't know if you guys know the answer.
I have a guess, but are people eating breakfast less
in general? And is their research that maybe is determined
that breakfast maybe isn't that most important meal of the
day that we were always kind of sold. Yes, people
are eating at least in the United States, people are
eating breakfast less often in general, like we had that
(41:39):
statistic we just mentioned with going from six percent of
people not even breakfast in seventy seven to not eating
breakfast at all today. As for the second part of
the question, kind of honestly, it depends on your lifestyle.
It depends on you know, do you live in an
agrarian society idea where you're you're eating breakfast and you're
(42:02):
going out and doing demanding physical labor from you know,
until the sun goes down. In that case, then you
probably do want something pretty hearty in the in the
beginning of your day. But then if you're in a
hurry to a place where you don't have a lot
of demanding physical labor, and you can kind of take
a break for a snack when you want. I don't know,
(42:23):
maybe equation changes. I don't think a lot of people
deify breakfast as much as they did in the past. Right,
and and again, you know, this is the kind of
statistic that would have been absolutely red meat for these
serial companies. You know, breakfast the most important meal of
the day. You gotta get your calories in, you know,
first thing. Uh. And and now we're also living in
(42:44):
a time where people are doing more like functional fasting
as well, where they maybe won't eat until dinner like
in that that that works for them. Um, So it
really against depends on who you ask, depends on what
your lifestyle is. Yeah, I mean I haven't eaten breakfast
in years. I don't need to two pm every day.
I do intermedi fasting. And your chipper is a daisy
(43:05):
at all times. Chipper is at whatever you get what
I'm get. Do you drink coffee max? I do I
drink coffee black? Yeah? Okay, it looks like we died
at the same conceptual breakfast club. But yeah, this is
this is pretty interesting because now that we are at
sort of the current the current state of Sereal. What
(43:26):
we can tell you for sure is that it's probably
not going to go away anytime soon. Nostalgia is a
heck of a drug. Also, the marketing folks working for
Cereal companies have a lot of skin in the game.
They've got a lot of experience, they know what works,
and they've shown a pattern of adjusting two different cultural
(43:47):
moments in society. They're even space cereals. That's a real thing. Uh,
it's the regular menu of NASA astronauts. I found that
the they have five or six different kinds. The Cereal
brand checks corn flakes, rice crispies. Oh and weirdly enough,
they also have grits with butter. I don't know what
(44:08):
grits taste like in space. I'm already kind of picky
about them on Earth. I also don't know what grits
tastes like without butter, and I don't want to know. Okay,
I don't want to know. Um, have you heard about
sugar and grits? I still that's a rubiciclon too far
from me. Yeah, I can you know sugary buttery grits?
I I could see the bed it's sort of like
(44:28):
cream of wheat, you know at that point. Uh, And
but no, to me, grits are always meant to be savory.
I like shrimp and grits, you know, or cheese grits,
things like that. The pimento cheese and grits, it's actually
quite good. I'm a recent pimento cheese convert really well. Yeah, well,
because it was just so orange, it always kind of
weirded me out. And the texture is a little odd. Um,
(44:49):
but man on a burger, you know, it actually melts
really nicely. Fantastic. Um. Before we wrap this episode, Uh,
can we talk a little bit about some like maybe
more global breakfast foods and uh, you know, people that
maybe aren't eating cereal. Um, they've got some fun ones here,
and I think I think each of us also brought
some surprises. Yeah what you got, Oh, well, we've got
(45:11):
you know, the Egyptian breakfasts. In ancient egypts peasants and
workers would drink some beer, eat some bread, and eat
a soup um or even onions before they would they
would head out to their slave labor, you know, building
the pyramids or whatever. It's interesting because you know the
concept of the modern American breakfast, or just the idea
(45:34):
of breakfast foods in general, really is a construct of
of advertising. Again thanks to our buddy Edward Burnet's Yeah,
we also know uh that at one point some members
of the clergy felt that breakfast was a sin. That's
the holy breakfast, so you don't eat anything. Dominican priest
(45:59):
Thomas at Unus said that you would be eating too soon,
you would be committing the sin of prey propere. Uh.
So this meant it was to him, was kind of gluttony.
It's like, why why can't you wait? And he was
he was telling people, you need to be like Max Williams,
wait till two pm. That's what That's what he was
saying in the in the thirteenth century. Um. But yeah, well,
(46:23):
and then like in the industrial evolution, when uh, everything
was determined by the workday and often you maybe wouldn't
even get a lunch break, who knows. You had to
kind of take your meals when you could, so loading
up first thing was really kind of the only way
to fly. Um. And they would eat things like anchovies
and oysters, and of course drink tons of wine and ale. Um.
(46:45):
This is all before eleven am. You know, so people
were kind of getting getting blasted and then working in
factories that were very dangerous. Wonder mortality rates were so huge. Also,
water still wasn't as safe as it has become now,
but yeah, there was. They were going hard before noon,
(47:07):
which is still kind of that before noon or before
five is still kind of an arbitrary rule. Right, Are
you guys familiar with the famous Finnish breakfast known as
blue Uru Blue Blue Roots, got the omlad over, the
oh and the oh b l oh that I'm not
familiar with. It is literally a cup of black coffee,
(47:29):
a shot of vodka, and a cigarette. Oh wow, alright, yes,
indeed there's a Reddit page with a picture of it,
and it's literally like on a little sauce for all
three of these items. You know, what I never understood is, uh, well,
I've had it before just because I felt like I
was it was a winning Rome situation. But the full
(47:50):
Irish are the full English breakfast bangers and uh and beans,
so much stuff. And it's so you could get tomatoes, beans, blood, sausage, bacon,
probably some sausage links and eggs and then you'll have
you usually have some toast. Oh you might have mushrooms,
(48:11):
but that's the stuff I see that. It is a lot.
But I will say this, and this is a thing
that I learned from Gordon Ramsey not to every long ago.
If you take tomatoes and mushrooms and you just put
them in a pan on low heat, they kind of
start to cook in their own juices and the tomato
gets a little crinkly, not like sugar crinkles. But that's
(48:32):
sort of the style of of preparing those for a
full English breakfast. The tomatoes that are kind of charred
and uh, really nice because it's like multiple bites. It
is a lot. But I might also go the way
of the sitcom and just eat a little bit here
and there and kind of, you know, compose some perfect
bites and then move on. I personally love a nice breakfast,
but usually only on the weekend. You know. Yeah, I'll
(48:54):
cook breakfast on on a weekend. But the way that
I cook is very slow and considered and oh what
do we have here? Very well? Uh so I'm usually
if I start cooking breakfast, it's to be charitable. We
called a brunch. One of my last breakfast shoutouts the Netherlands,
(49:14):
there's this thing called hoggle slog Uh. It's a slice
of bread that has chocolate sprinkles on it. Have you
guys heard of this? No? Please, No, that's it. That's
I didn't believe it. I thought they have butter so
the sprinkles don't fall off. But yeah, that's it. That's
literally it. And somehow it has less gramps of sugar
(49:37):
with that somehow. Yes, but this is a I think
we should also do an episode just about breakfast, because
that is such a uniquely different thing. You know, it's
it's always weird. Like you go to uh, you know,
you just walk by different, um different like regionally specific restaurants,
(49:57):
and you see that not all of them served some
kind of breakfas this dish. Right, Like, the idea of
what people in China might eat for breakfast isn't something
that's really caught on in the United States, at least
in the parts I've I've visited. And that's what kind
of was getting out earlier. I sometimes like eat a
bowl of ramen for breakfast with like a poached egg
in it, you know, or just leftovers. I really I
(50:19):
kind of resent being held to the standard of what
is and is not a breakfast food or what time
those types of food should be consumed. I like to
to live live on the edge. Have you guys, Uh,
last one for me? Have you guys heard of Welsh
rabbit or Welsh rabbits y? Yeah? Yeah, it contains neither
Welsh nor rabbits Um. It is a piece of toast
(50:42):
with kind of a cheesy um gravy kind of melt
concoction over it, often served with a poach egg. And
anyone who's a Paul Thomas Anderson fan will remember that
Daniel Lee Lewis's character from Phantom Thread orders breakfast with
bacon SCons, butter cream jam, a pot of lap saying
su chong t and some sausages and an order of
(51:05):
Welsh rare bit with a poached egg not too running.
The poached egg not too running. We are going to
call it a day. They are all sorts of breakfast
is that we want to talk about. And I think
part of it is because, uh, outside of maximal, I
don't know about you know, but I might be getting hungry.
I might have a little bit of a nausha head.
(51:26):
Get that daytime bagel, daytime bagel, No more two am
bagels for me. Guys, this is the beginning of a
whole new era, and we hope that you join us
and give us your thoughts about breakfast around the world.
This is when that's gonna be pretty exciting for us
in the meantime. Thanks as always to our super producer
(51:47):
and research associate for this week series, Mr Max Williams.
Thanks to Jonathan Strickland. I actually talked with Jonathan just
very briefly through uh through text. I was between so
I was trying to prank text him and I didn't
know if it was his number or if it was
someone else on my phone, but it is his number.
(52:07):
He sends his regards. I don't know whether they're warm
regards or like cold sinister regards. He said he is
looking forward to joining us soon, So the rumors are true.
We are in contact. Don't tempt me with a good time,
ben Okay. Well, Instead, what I'm saying is the Quister
might show up. Yeah, We've been teasing that for for
like a year. And where is he? Where is this Quister?
(52:30):
I don't believe he exists anymore, And this would be
the exact opportunity moment for him to pop up. If
we weren't already an hour into this podcast, we wouldn't
do that to you ridiculous historians. But yeah, I don't know,
weld we tried. I mean really, I'm actually kind of
blown away by how much there was to talk about
regarding the history of cereal. But it also kind of
makes so much sense because it's really tied in with
(52:51):
a lot of different threads, you know, from history, in
terms of like the kind of holistic health food movement,
marketing too cartoon characters to breakfast foods, and I mean,
it's just I don't know, it's a whole ball of ax,
and it's been a pleasure discussing it with you fellas. Yes,
agreed and likewise, So tune in next week, folks. We're
(53:12):
gonna be exploring some even more bizarre, strange tales of
yesteryear that won't have They won't be related to cereal,
I think, but if they are, we'll bring some props.
We'll eat some cereal while we do while we do
our next episodes. Huge thanks to christophrostiotis here in spirit,
(53:32):
Eves Jeff Coat gallivanting around this wide world of sports
doing great work, and gosh, do you Max and and
uh and of course to you Benjamin, Thank you mill
and Jamin uh. And of course big thanks to all
those wonderful Cereal mascots except for that Crinkles guy. We'll
see you, nice set, folks. For more podcasts from I
(54:00):
Heeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History News
Hosts And Creators
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
Popular Podcasts
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Therapy Gecko
An unlicensed lizard psychologist travels the universe talking to strangers about absolutely nothing. TO CALL THE GECKO: follow me on https://www.twitch.tv/lyleforever to get a notification for when I am taking calls. I am usually live Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays but lately a lot of other times too. I am a gecko.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.