UK CEREAL VARIETY PACK EXTRAVAGANZA!!!

Day 1: Rice Krispies Multi-Grain, Formerly Rice Krispies Muddles
Box claim: “Helps Boost friendly bacteria”

I went out to get dinner somewhere, and came back with a bottle of concentrated orange juice and a pack of eight tiny cereal boxes.

It’s culturally educational.

First of all, the only place the juice mentions that it's concentrated is in tiny print on the back of the bottle, where it warns against giving it to toddlers without dilution; the juice, you see, is so concentrated, like a black hole, it would absorb the infant, causing a baby implosion. It’s That Sweet ®. Anyway, I’m too lazy to ferry water, so I’m enjoying my extremely potent juice right now, sip by sip. And has my structural integrity been affected by the antimatter OJ? Not yet, thanks to multi-grain Rice Krispies! With friendly bacteria!

It’s really quite a suspicious cereal, actually. Snap, Crackle, and Pop, the three onomatopoeic advocates of the traditional Rice Krispies, are featured on the box as they bodysurf down a deluge of cereal, smiling, jazz hands in the air. But the trio avoids eye-contact with the viewer. In fact, their gazes are diverted in every portrayal on the box. Curious.

Upon inspection of the cereal, their embarrassment becomes understandable. The Brothers Krisp never had much sympathy for health food; rather it was the powers that be, perhaps Kellogg Himself, that pressured the three into creating this multi-grain nonsense. Multi-grain, of course, means brown, bland, and beneficial. Trust me, kids.

Anyway, Multi-Grain Rice Krispies bear no resemblance in shape, form, or taste, to Rice Krispies as the new world knows them. The cereal is cheerio-like in crunch factor, features two shades of brown, and four wild and wacky shapes. Luckily for the brothers, the shapes are unquestionably delightful: tree, fish, star, and person. Yes. The tree is of the genus Christmas, the fish is very similar to a goldfish cracker, the star may in fact be a sea star, or a five-legged cephalopod of some sort, and the person is a little humanoid. Delightful. Snap, Crackle, and Pop trumped themselves and designed a cereal that represents all of the universe and beyond the infinite. Perhaps they were trying to compensate for the boring multi-grain flavor, I don’t know. The box mentions that it was original called Rice Krispie Muddles. To muddle something is to jumble it, to befuddle it, to mix it. What they’ve muddled is cat food shapes and grain, soul and body. To quote Walt Whitman, “I totally dig it.”

FINAL RATING: two and a half marmosets