Miniwheats

My whole family likes Miniwheats. Tanya introduced me to them back when we first got married, and I am hooked. Now, original Shredded Wheat is one of the more disgusting culinary inventions that I know of. It's just a brick of knitted wheat-based fibers that look like they are ready to be made into a burlap sack, and taste that way. They tried to improve on this at one point by making a cereal called Miniwheats -- not the same as the present version, and I don't even think you can find them anymore. These were simply smaller bricks of unflavoured wheat fiber, each one still too big to fit in one's mouth. Then someone at Kellogg's got a brilliant idea: why don't we make them so small that you can actually spoon them into your mouth like other cereal. Genius!

They called the new cereal "Bite-sized Miniwheats." And then they went totally crazy and put sugar on them. I don't know why this took so long, since every other cereal is full of sugar. These were "Frosted Bite-sized Miniwheats" -- today simply Miniwheats. The great thing about this cereal is that it tastes quite sweet for the amount of sugar on it, because all the sugar is on the outside where you can taste it (and, if you're like me, you make sure that the sugar side always goes directly on the tongue). Coating is an easy way to get flavour without all the bad things (calories) that go with it. Another food that takes advantage of coating is salted nuts, which are not nearly as full of salt as you might think. Soups are the exact opposite: all the flavouring gets mixed thoroughly, so you have to have a lot of anything to experience its flavour. That's why soups are full of salt -- usually over 100% of your RDA, sometimes 200%. Even low-salt soups are still pretty salty compared to other foods, but they don't taste that way.

Recently they have added some additional Miniwheat flavours, such as strawberry and blueberry. I actually like these quite a bit, but I had to laugh at the official flavours: it's not just "blueberry," it's "blueberry muffin." As though the cereal has anything in common with blueberry muffins other than the blueberries. It's obviously a marketing ploy, and one that works, too, at least on my kids. Alex was telling me how much he loved the cereal. "At first, Mom just said it was blueberry," he explained. "And I didn't want that. But then I read the box and saw that it was blueberry muffin!"

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Country Music

I noticed a long time ago that there isn't much difference between the sound of country music and rock music nowadays. If I'm surfing my radio and I come to a station playing jazz, classical, or rap, I recognize it right away; but if I come to a country or rock station, I often can't tell which it is until the song is half over. Country songs often have screaming guitars that would fit equally well in a hard rock song, and only a minority have a recognizably country instrument such as a fiddle or a banjo. All the same, no one could listen to a country music station for more than a few minutes without realizing that it is definitely not a rock station. What are the differences? There are some stylistic differences. Country songs are more likely to have a boogey beat or certain western-sounding bass lines. They also tend to be more formulaic: if you can't predict how a country song ends, you probably don't listen to much country music. But those things aren'
Read more

Science and Philosophy, Part I: Hume and Popper

I've been listening to a lecture series on philosophy recently, and, even though I haven't gotten past the Greeks yet, it has reminded me of a number of issues that trouble me about science. I want to take the opportunity to express my concerns here. Along the way, I will probably oversimplify philosophy a great deal -- not on purpose, but rather because I have only a simplistic understanding of it. I welcome responses to clear up my misconceptions. One of my issues with science is the famous idea of Karl Popper that it can never establish positive claims, only falsify wrong ones. The history of this goes back to David Hume, the 18th century Scottish sceptic. He shook up the philosophical world by claiming that science could never prove anything through induction -- that is, drawing conclusions about physical laws based on observations. The classic illustration is the sun's rising. Even though the sun has risen every day for our whole lives, and for countless human l
Read more

Three stages in liberal denial of media bias

I was 15 years old in 1984, and an avid follower of politics and the news. When Reagan was making his decision whether to run for re-election, I was opposed to it. It wasn't that I didn't like Reagan; I loved him. But I was convinced that he wouldn't stand a chance in the election, and I didn't want to see him lose. Of course, he went on to win one of the most lopsided elections in history. Why was I so wrong? Because I had been watching network news (the only kind, back then) and the coverage was overwhelmingly negative. Since that time, I have watched with disbelief as liberals have criticized Fox News as unbalanced, culminating in the amazing spectacle of the president himself declaring that Fox is not a legitimate source of journalism. Meanwhile, these same liberals refuse to acknowledge that ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, CNN, etc. (ad nauseum) have any bias of their own. What makes this all the more incredible is that a number of studies have been produced demonstr
Read more