Cheerios

Today I had Cheerios for breakfast. Some of you may be worried that i did something horrible to the cheerios. My love of savory oatmeal dishes has taken some interesting turns through the years, but i assure you, the Cheerios were had with milk, and not with pesto, barbecue sauce, or pepperoni. It was basically what you expect with a breakfast of Cheerios: the crunchy, salty fibrousness of the oats interacting with the cool sweetness of the milk. Overall enjoyable but unremarkable. I myself have something of a weakness for Cheerios. I'm not going to get passionate about it, but sometimes you just want to eat certain things and sometimes that thing is Cheerios. Furthermore, in their dry form they make a pretty decent snack food, and are an acceptable if uninspiring replacement for popcorn. Heres the thing. It has been mentioned to me that some people have problems with Cheerios that go beyond the usual "corporations are gunna git us" thing that is so common in my circle.

As best as I can recall, it came up when I was still living in Worcester. I brought home a big thing of Cheerios from the store, and one of my roommate, I don't remember which, said something along the lines of "cheerios, yich (with a hard ch, like in Hebrew)." and made the type of face that one would expect when someone says a word like "yich (with a hard ch, like in Hebrew)."I was somewhat taken aback, as Cheerios has a taste that is about as offensive as vanilla. its not particularly good, but it really never occurred to me that it could arouse negative passions. I probed for a reason why. Is it the milk? The crunchiness? the fact that it tastes generically like bread? What about Cheerios could possibly be anything except mild disinterest?

I do not remember the answer specifically, my impression was that it was somewhat nebulous and non specific. This is often a problem when I ask someone why they do not like something, and it is even more common a response with food. This is a conundrum for me, as I am a person who likes cooking for people. If you can't tell me what they dislike, I cannot fix it. And yet, having been on the other end, I know people feel attacked. I would never want anyone to feel forced to eat/listen/watch something that they disliked merely out of politeness to me. I would like to be able to make it so such an unpleasantness doesn't occur again, but people often have very shaky understandings of why they like anything. That's not a criticism, I do it too. Academics in any specific profession spend years developing a specific vocabulary to allow them to describe exactly what is good or bad about a specific topic. People think they are being elitist, which may be part of it, but without knowing about music theory, who here can really, specifically tell me what they like or dislike about any given song? Even with music theory, many critiques, even written by classically trained professionals, come down to inexact words like "energy." There is a major part of me that is driven absolutely insane by the inexactitude of reality.

There is another side to why people cannot tell me what they dislike about food, and this, as it turns out, has more to do with Cheerios. After a few minutes of weedling, the person in question said something along the lines of "I dunno, its kid's food." The sentence brought to mind immediately an event from my childhood. One of the mothers in the Chavura, or study group, to which my family belongs had packed her child numerous baggies of Cheerios, baby carrots, and celery. I was very young, and this kid was younger than me. There were, at the time, probably 7 or 8 of us kids in this Chavura at the time, and we had been stuck in a play area of the house while the adults did adult things. I was somewhat bored. I didn't really see these kids outside of the Chavura, and most of them were either noticeably younger than me, or so much older than me that they wanted little to do with me. In these situations a pecking order rapidly develops where the younger kids want to play with the older kids, and the older kids want to go home. Being the second oldest kid there, I wanted out, or to play with the only kid older than me. As he was occupied with a computer game at the time, I was basically quite too busy moping to play with the kid with the cheerios. nonetheless, he tried to get me to play with him. Being excessively bored, and something of a sympathetic soul, I consented to watching him play with over-sized Leggos. So there I was, sitting, im a room full of toddlers and post-toddlers, and this kid offers me some Cheerios.

As I have mentioned, I like Cheerios. I took the baggy from him and opened it, and the smell of the Cheerios hit me. For some reason it sickened me. the smell of the oats and the wheat, which usually smells alluring or at least uninspiring, smelled sickeningly sweet. I was momentarily stunned, and not sure what to do. I knew i liked Cheerios. They didn't smell different than Cheerios normally do. But they smelled somehow appalling.

In later years I have associated the feeling with the smell that comes off of daycare centers and old age homes. It is probably some instinctive reaction to the germiness of those environments. I'm not sure how my body developed this reaction, and it is somewhat subjective, as I have the same reaction to applejuice, but it is intensely physical and makes me feel nauseated by the food in question.

The association of food and environment is pretty common in my life. We all have certain assumptions about an environment when a certain kind of food comes our way, and we all know how events in our lives can affect the way we view other things. For instance, we can never be sure whether we dislike a certain pop artists because we dislike their music, or because we have defined our selfs against liking them. What is wonderfully bazaar is when we take on expectations and physical reactions to food. I could probably write chapters analyzing the different facets of this, and discussing where evolutionary survival strategies end and human psychosis begins. What is clear to me is that I have the makings of an interesting hypothesis: some people don't like Cheerios because their moms gave it to them as a "healthy" snack food, and as such they associate it with unhealthy conditions.

Some psychology student could probably write an interesting thesis on the power of association and its relation to the enjoyment or rejection of childhood foods. Why do we like mac and cheese and hate baby food and cheerios? its all obviously subjective. I like Cheerios, some normal people, and a lot of bums, think it is perfectly ok to eat baby food. Why do i get physically ill at the thought of the texture of slimy, slippery baby food, but am sexually excited by the thought of eating mac and cheese, that deliciously gooey and oozy food? there are texture and temperature differences, but are they that big? If I heated baby food, would you eat it?

I wouldn't.