Local foodstuff mega-company General Mills, which was formed in 1904 by the merger of Specific Mills and Vague Mills, announced that its profits have been hit by high ingredient costs.
There's the price of corn, which previously had one purpose: being eaten as corn. Now it's used for high-fructose corn syrup, which some say will give a brick diabetes if soaked long enough, and it's used in plastics, as people who subscribe to the Star Tribune's popular "dog-waste disposal system" know. (It's a great deal -- sign up for daily bag delivery and we'll include a newspaper inside at no charge.) And there's ethanol, of course. So the price goes up, and a box of cereal shrinks until you're paying four bucks for something the size of a paperback book.
Perhaps General Mills has deeper problems. The ingenious joy that once fueled the breakfast cereal industry seems to have sputtered and died, replaced by a grim insistence that you eat so much fiber it starts shooting out your cuffs like hay from an overstuffed scarecrow.
Anyone who spends a lot of time in the cereal aisle, trying to decide which indistinguishable fiber-fortified stuff is cheaper this week, gets a twinge of nostalgia for the days when cereals boasted that they were sweetened. Promised it. Fortified with Dextrose! Gives you energy! So does licking a nuclear fuel rod, you say, and that's not healthy. Granted.
But no one's introduced a sugary-cereal mascot for decades, not since Cookie Crisp's fat happy baker. (I think they realized they crossed the line with that one.)
In the old days you had basic cereals that were aimed at adults who were perfectly capable of adding sugar, thank you, and a few grim, joyless brands aimed at old men who believed that economic problems were the result of constipation, and if people just chewed these here Chester Graham's Oat Rocks 300 times per mouthful, we could get industrial production back on track.
But most of the shelves were for kids, and most of the products had happy cartoon mascots who vibrated with sugary joy like a tuning fork tapped with a Tootsie Pop. Let us remember:
Alpha-Bits was hawked by a cross-eyed dancing mailman who looked like Phil Silvers after someone slipped mescaline in his morning Folgers. You had Frankenberry, which exploited the natural, obvious relationship between sugar-infused oat nodules and a pink creature made of disparate reanimated body parts.
