Purple Stars, Green Clovers, and Tiny, Little Brown Insects

When I was a kid, my favorite cereal wasn’t anything I saw advertised during Saturday morning cartoons. No. I liked Alpen, which in Switzerland is known as muesli and is so satisfying, you will find that a serving size of a half a cup is sufficient. My friends made fun of me. “Hey, look who’s eating his Alpo! How’s your Alpo, huh? Heh heh heh.” I kept brilliant company.

The graphics on my Alpen box did not feature any eye-popping, drooling cartoon character painted in retina-stinging, fluorescent, sugary, hallucinogenic, tantrum-inducing colors. No. My Alpen box showed a rustic, hand-hewn Swiss windowsill, upon which is arranged a photographic still life of wheat, hazelnuts, barley malt powder, and rye flakes—the actual ingredients of the cereal itself.

Imagine if the manufacturers of Super Mondo Sugar Rushing Bazooka Fruit Cereal were as forthright as to actually show the world what went into their product. They’d have to show vats of High Fructose Corn Syrup, laboratory beakers filled with garish food coloring, and parsimoniously measured piles of vitamin and mineral fortification powder. Much easier (and more FUN!) to use some pop-eyed acid trip creature like the Crunchberry Beast to move product.

Anyway, I stopped eating Alpen almost as soon as I hit the age of financial independence, when I realized how damned expensive Alpen is. A family-sized box of Monster Tooth Rattle costs less than half the price of a slim little package of muesli.

Then my wife and I were invited to housesit for some friends while they were RVing all over the Western USA. The first morning we were at their house, I was getting my bearings, brainstorming what I’d have for breakfast, and came upon a gold mine—in the form of an opened box of Alpen cereal. “Surely I should eat that,” thought I. “I’d be doing our friends a favor to so thoughtfully purge their home of perishable items.”

I lustfully poured out the package contents, bottomlessly thrilled at the prospect of being reunited with my favorite childhood breakfast food. I was a kid who could go through an entire box of cereal while bombarding the rest of my senses with vintage Warner Brothers cartoons, no problem. I soaked my treasured Alpen with milk and sat at the table, thankful for this sweet reunion.

As I lowered my spoon into the bowl, I noticed some things floating in the milk that I did not recognize from the list of ingredients. Grain bugs. Dozens of them. I looked at the remaining contents of the bag. I had uncovered a veritable grain bug metropolis. The bug civilization in the bag went about its business, not caring for my look of horror and disgust.

“Perhaps I can fish these few bugs out of my bowl,” I considered, Scotsman that I am. “Anyway, they’re just about the same size, shape, and texture as some of the smaller rye flakes. It probably wouldn’t hurt to just eat them. What’s a little extra protein? The ones in my bowl don’t seem to be moving, so it wouldn’t technically be murder. . . ”

I set the bowl down. I set the spoon down. I stared at the cereal. I got up. I sat back down. I picked up the spoon. I got up. What should I do? I found myself wholly unable to determine a next reasonable action. I stared at the cereal again. When my wife saw me not eating my cereal but rather viewing the contents of my bowl as if contemplating the remains of a departed friend, she asked, “What’s up, Honey?”

I then explained the entire situation, which provoked a lengthy speech on the topic of Not Taking What Isn’t Yours. I was, as you might imagine, the ideal audience for such harangue—cranky, hungry, and thoroughly thwarted in my attempts. “First of all,” she said, “I wouldn’t have looked at the Alpen and thought ‘Oh, Boy! Now I can enjoy!’”

“God bless you, Honey,” I thought, as I poured the cereal down the Dispose-All.

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