Interlude: Musings on Corn Flakes

 

I know, I know. I just gave you a breakfast post. I never include cereal in those; it's far too obvious. But I do eat cereal, and sometimes not just for breakfast. Here I am possibly overthinking corn flakes (solely in my brain; the bowl is just corn flakes and soy milk), but I guess I'm in the mood to muse.

Lately, it's been a struggle. You know this if you've been reading along with my intermittent spurts of despair. It's been a struggle for many of you, too. I'm in a transitional phase, and I genuinely don't know what comes next for me. Sometime in April I had a huge rug pulled out from under me and I've been floundering ever since. It doesn't help that the rugs under us keep disappearing, either. So that has meant more cereal meals than usual.

As a distraction, I started diving into Google Books to read old vegetarian magazines. (I know, I'm exciting.) The 19th century was different than ours, and also not so different. And it got me thinking about corn flakes. (I'm a historian, after all. It happens.)

Corn flakes are, of course, one of the original vegetarian staples, an invention of the Kellogg brothers, who brought us cold cereal itself. The Kelloggs had some weird ideas, but so did a lot of people in the early Western iterations of vegetarianism (which was often veganism, incidentally, before the term itself was coined). Today, some of what they say seems bizarre (like claims that vegetarianism will cure alcoholism), some of it is startling but practical (corn flakes don't carry food odors through the air like meaty breakfasts and will therefore attract fewer flies), some of it boggles the mind (they say you should toast your corn flakes in the oven and then eat them dry with fruit and possibly a splash of cream, but almost never mention milk), and some of it is surprisingly modern (like warnings about refined sugar and white flour not being that great for you in the end). Reading about all those early vegetarians again got me thinking about the joy of simple food. At times, I definitely make things too complicated.

But they made things complicated, too. It's not exactly simple to put corn flakes in the oven so your cereal is warm! Their breakfasts weren't just corn flakes, cream, and fruit; they'd also want you to have hot cocoa and muffins and potatoes and all sorts of other things alongside the cereal, to be fair to me. Although these sound like delightful combinations, I'm not prepared to make such meals in the morning day in and day out. I don't think I have the appetite to eat them, let alone the time and energy to cook them!

I hadn't eaten corn flakes since making my transition to veganism (as I noted in my post about vegan schnitzel a few days ago). It may not have just been the cholecalciferol in most brands. Corn flakes were once my favorite cereal, and I had what I had considered the perfect way to serve them--with whole milk and a bit of sugar. I thought that having loved the taste of that so much I wouldn't like them with plant-based milk. But time has passed, and now I don't find milk from a cow appealing at all. I also eat a lot less sugar, and I'm not inclined to put it in my cereal.

But I'd bought some vegan corn flakes for the schnitzel, and I usually like soy milk in my cereal these days. So I poured some soy milk over my corn flakes, skipped the sugar because the soy milk was sweetened anyway, took a bite, and enjoyed a whole new-to-me thing. It's simple, but somehow soothing in these challenging times. It's a memory in a way--the taste of the flakes themselves is still really familiar--without being overwhelming.

I am trying, still. There will be plenty of fun foods to share with you. And there is nothing remarkable about corn flakes, except that sometimes that's the remarkable thing. It can be truly remarkable that we keep going in the face of it all. It's remarkable to live in an age when a meal can be prepared as quickly as opening a box and pouring things in a bowl. And it's remarkable that people have been doing that for more than a century, many with the same motives I have for choosing what to eat.

So here's to cereal. Here's to those fascinating people who invented it well over a century ago to avoid meat. And here's to trying again tomorrow, to see what we can do to fascinate the 22nd century.