Thursday, May 25, 2006
Choose Your Poison
I’ve long enjoyed eating a strange British breakfast cereal called Weetabix. It’s a compressed biscuit of grain flakes that totally falls apart in milk to the extent that, made soggy enough, you could suck it through a straw. It’s the perfect medium for the consumption of granulated sugar. Lately it’s been more widely available here in these States of United, and since it’s so delightfully mushy we’ve been getting it for Zachary as well as for ourselves.
On the back of the ‘bix box (that’s kind of fun to say actually) there is a sort of contest-y thing in which consumers are encouraged to share their favorite ways of eating ‘bix. Traditionally I’ve just poured milk over them, dumped in a few pounds of the white granule, and slorped away, but the box also identifies such curious options as trying it with yogurt and fresh fruit(s), using warm milk, using warm milk and feeding it to a baby, or slathering it with butter and jam and eating it like a cracker. I must admit, the first of these sounds fairly pedestrian, and the second and third don’t sound too different from each other; the last one just sounds nasty – and the photo of it doesn’t help. It looks like it will just collapse into a dry, crumbly mass of sticky buttery crumbs in my mouth. And if I’m going to get a mouthful of buttery crumb first thing in the a. of m., they’re going to have to make it worth my while.
The box also invites us to check here (or here) for more ideas on alternative bix-consumption protocols, but I’ve scoured those sites and I can’t find any reference to “favorite ways to eat ‘bix.” They do tell me that Weetabix is chock full of “prebiotics,” and that the maximum number of ‘bix to be consumed in a day is four (which I can easily double, or triple if I’m home sick), and how old a child must be before being fed bix (they’re apparently unsuitable for those under six months of age), and what prebiotics are (it’s what Steve Austin was when he was an astronaut, before the crash and the surgeries and that unpleasantness with Oscar).
Needless to say, though I enjoy my ‘bix, I am bitterly disappointed with this lame-ass failure to tell me more and better ways to enjoy these fascinating wads of grainy goodness. And of course it got me to thinking of more ways I might eat my Weetabix – ways that the good people at the Weetabix Food Company LLP (Kettering, Northamptonshire, marketed domestically by Barbara’s Bakery) might not previously have anticipated. After all, it’s been manufactured since the early ‘30s, and after such a long time you can get stuck in a stuck in a stuck in a rut. Thusly. So, in the interest of wasting your goddamn time as thoroughly as I’ve wasted my own, I am overbearingly proud to disgorge upon you, BETTER WAYS TO EAT WEETABIX THAN THEY TELL YOU ON THE BOX:
* Drowned in the blood of my vanquished enemies
* Sprinkled with platinum leaf, on a bed of thousand dollar bills
* Fed to me in a hot tub by a stable of mega-geishas
* From the cold metallic hand of my own personal killer robot slave
* Clandestinely injected with steroids and cereal growth hormone (CGH)
* Off the calloused knuckles of Chuck Norris’ fist
* Enriched to a weapons-grade radioactive isotope (BiX237)
* Under a cloud of unproved allegations of official misconduct
* Tossed into my mouth from just outside the three-point line, hitting nothing but tongue, baby, nothing but tongue
* During a painful and embarrassing medical procedure that’s being broadcast live to a nationwide audience
* Through my gaping glistening gills
* Lightly toasted in the furnaces of Mordor
* During re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere in my own private intergalactic spacecraft
* Sdrawkcab
* In proud defiance, with a sprinkling of poignant regret
* With a goddamn spoon.
That’s all for me today. Good breakfast to ya.