My Cold Cereal Speed Complex
Is cold cereal the childhood foundation of America’s obsession with speed?
Go with me on this one.
I was splitting my time between eating my cereal before it got soggy and trying to complete the maze puzzle on the back of the box. The first problem being that I didn’t have a pen or highlighter to track my progress through the maze. So, every time I took a bite of cereal, I would effectively be forced to start over.
Nobody wants soggy cold cereal, especially cinnamon toast crunch. But, in America, we feed our kids (yes that includes the adult version of me) foods that start out wonderful but become unrecognizable as food in a perilous amount of time.
If we are going to let General Mills and Kellogg’s tell us their time-bomb diabetes pills are the foundation of a balanced diet, then it’s not unreasonable that this cultural norm is not also the foundation of a lifetime’s obsession with hurrying up.
I wonder if the process of evolution, or cultural socialization, has given our brains the ability to discern between different forms of escaping food. We already know that food is essential to survival. For the purposes of this analogy, we will assume cold cereal is actually food. But what is the difference between how our brain deals with a deer we failed to take down and the rapidly disintegrating sugar-coated cardboard squares in milk?
I don’t know. I’m not a neuroscientist. I am, however, concerned that I have been suckered into a life filled with an immense need to get in, get done, and get out.
Originally published at brigandtiff.com on August 2, 2017.
