aefenglommung (aefenglommung) wrote,
aefenglommung
aefenglommung

Sweet Memories

So, I'm sitting here, eating a bowl of granola, thinking how sweet it is. But it's nothing compared to the breakfast cereals of my childhood. Marketing to kids was new in the 1950s, but our parents -- who all went through the Depression and World War Two -- were pretty indulgent toward their kids. They didn't want them to be deprived of anything. Plus, they remembered when sugar was rationed, so "sugar" was a selling point to adults as well as children. Everybody approved of sugar. (And we're talking pure cane sugar; high-fructose corn syrup hadn't made its appearance at this stage.)

So, we had Frosted Flakes, Sugar Corn Pops, Sugar Smacks, Sugar Crisp. New cereals were being developed all the time, with cute, cartoony characters like Cap'n Crunch, Quisp, Count Chocula. These cereals may not have trumpeted "SUGAR!" in their names, but all of them were loaded with it. And you know what we little Boomers did with those cereals? That's right, we took a spoon and started dumping more granulated sugar on top of it. Often, not just one spoonful, and every spoonful was heaped up as high as we could get it. When we got to the bottom of the bowl, there would be this thick sludge of sugar in the leftover milk. And more than a few of us then drank that off to finish breakfast.

It's a wonder any of us are alive today.
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