*Helen Lovejoy voice* Won’t someone please think of the nutrients!
You can tell a lot about a person based on the specific type of food they choose to horse down their gullet every morning under the guise of breakfast cereal.
As has been hammered into our fragile little minds since birth, breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Truthfully, it’s not. The most essential one comes after dinner, or as I like to call it, The Treat Zone, whereby you feel fully deserving of something naughty for finishing all your dinner, as if it required any kind of skill to do so.
In the interest of housekeeping, we’re talking about brand name cereals here today. Discount alternatives are available, so if you’re a non-brand consumer legend, simply match your poison to the nearest applicable cereal.
Here’s what your choice of breakfast cereal says about you as a person.
Weetabix
As a proud grandfather of twelve, sustenance is very important to you. You need to ensure that your breakfast is setting you up for a jam-packed day filled with intermediate level Sudokus, reading broadsheet newspapers in enclosed spaces, whistling along to Absolute Radio – Classic Rock and emitting a tiny noise from your nose every time you inhale, due to a buildup of nasal matter.
Most of your friends are dead now, but they left behind a lifetime of memories and thoroughly obliterated housing markets. You bought your house for £5 and a bucket of duck eggs, which you then furnished by hand. For fun, you like to drink precisely one glass of whiskey and then fall asleep. You dream of ways to cut the grass more efficiently without having to splurge on a sit-down lawnmower. If you could have one wish granted, it would be for people to turn off lights around the house when they’re not using those particular areas. One can only dream!
Coco Pops
With a mental age of approximately 15, you’re finding it tough to navigate a world where you’re legally acknowledged as being 28 years old. Your bed is shaped like a race car and there’s Space Jam posters littered across your bedroom walls. You still live at home, not because you have to, but simply because you want to and also can’t afford to leave. Also, your Mum still slips a hot water bottle into your bed for when you return (extremely alone) home from a night out.
Your desk job hasn’t quite filled the void left by the rejection letter from what you affectionately refer to as Big Boy Flying School, where your dreams of becoming a pilot were halted due to severe colourblindness. Still, Mum’s still proud of her little man. Last week, you successfully washed your trainers by hand to bring them back to a dazzling shade of off-white. Now you can proudly wear them the job centre when you get fired for forgetting to clock out again.
Corn Flakes
As an up-and-coming business tycoon, you’ve got precious time in the mornings to get yourself out of the house and into the rat race. A quick bowl of Corn Flakes mixed with a splash of chilled milk from a glass bottle is all you can squeeze in before you’re hitting the office to cash cheques and snap metaphorical necks. You’ll browse the stocks app on the train into work, but only if there’s someone nearby to see you doing so. Otherwise, it’s Candy Crush all day, baby.
Even on casual Friday you wear a three piece suit because as your Helvetica font upper arm tattoo says, ‘Business never sleeps’. Your long-term career goal is to go back in time and invent Facebook, or failing that, set up some kind of vague business plan that you can talk your way into selling to Google for £25billion. Although currently overwhelmingly single, you’re not worried. Much like Evan Spiegel after Snapchat was valued at $29b, the hot models in their 20s will eventually come running to you, but you’ll hold off for Orlando Bloom’s ex, get married and name your kid after an internal body organ.
Special K
“Mo Farah ran a half marathon in 59 minutes? Pffft, I could do it in 25”, you say as you shovel a mid-morning protein bar into every and any available orifice. Health and fitness isn’t just a hobby for someone like you, it’s a lifestyle. Your body is a temple, and that temple is a work in progress, not that you’d openly admit it. Approximately six months ago you decided to get fit, investing in more lycra than one single Amazon transaction should allow.
You’re kitted out now, armed with the tools to unlock your inner athlete. A brisk walk twice a week hasn’t quite achieved the results you desire just yet, but everything is progress. A large bowl of Special K with full fat milk and two giant slices of butter-slathered white toast is all your personal machine needs to get you through to your mid-morning snack of a chocolate bar and full fat latte. Fitness is your identity. You are health. You are nutrition. You are in severe debt thanks to your extortionate gym membership fees and subscription to Men’s Health magazine.
Cheerios
Hello, fraud. Good of you to join us here. You’ve had a good run, but the jig is up. The world is no longer convinced that you are a real adult and it’s entirely because of your choice of breakfast cereal. Cheerios are just adult Weetos and you’ll do very little to convince us otherwise. Sure, you think you’re getting some nutrition with these multicoloured grainy hoops, but this isn’t why you’re eating them. You crave the simplicity of childhood and you’ll do anything to replicate it.
It started with adult diapers, then graduated into paying women to come round your house and pretend to be your mother, with you as the baby. Now you’re pinning it all down to the distant relationship with your birth parents, but really, it’s you. You’re the problem. Always have been. Ever since school, everything had to be simplistic and exactly to your liking. Sure, eat Cheerios if you want, but it’s getting to be about that time where you finally grow up and accept responsibility for your failings. You are 36 years old, Peter. You have a mortgage.
Rice Krispies
Please, allow the pounding of your hangover to ease as you heed this wake-up call. Your life has gotten out of control. Between the booze, drugs, parties and fondness for Monster energy drinks, your body is failing. It’s on its last legs, you must cease ignoring the warning signs. While you sometimes exercise moments of caution for ill health, such as opting for Rice Krispies rather than Frosties in the supermarket, these small steps aren’t enough. Things are in crisis mode, you are nearing the end of your life.
You must regain control. Take up yoga, read a book, get out of bed before 9am. There’s a whole world out there that you’re failing to embrace. Take a deep breath. Pour yourself a bowl of Rice Krispies and call your boss. You’re not going into work again today, you’re going to take a shower and listen to ‘Smooth’ by Carlos Santana featuring Rob Thomas. Hear that? It’s the second half of your life beginning. Stop watching true crime documentaries before bed. Change your sheets. Open the windows. Light a candle. Shower. Use a deep conditioner in your hair. Survive.
Shredded Wheat
Your friends are too polite to say it, but I’ve no qualms in being the one to inform you: You’re the most boring person alive. It’s hard to trace when exactly the turning point came about, since you were a reasonable hoot during your teenage years, but adulthood has hardened you. You never go out anymore, you’re settled now. The height of excitement during a typical weekend for you involves climbing to the top of a steep hill so you can get a good Instagram photo, then complaining the whole way back down again. “Not even worth it for 11 likes”, you moan.
Not content with simply being boring as hell, you’re also quite smug about it. You smile knowingly as your friends recall the wild nights out they’re having, waiting for a gap in conversation to announce that you haven’t had a hangover in six months. Your phone doesn’t ring as much as it used to, not like how you read in The Guardian that society is moving into less invasive means of conversations due to a shift in the human condition, it’s actually because nobody wants to talk to your boring self anymore. Sorry. You’re a lost cause. Death is near, though.
Alpen
Your name is either Theodore, Hugo, Rupert, Maximilian or Rufus. You are an heir to some British confectionary dynasty and have never, nor will you ever work a day in your life. You spend most of your days meandering around your mansion dressed in a silk dressing gown, smoking a cigar and making phone calls to your parents’ various enterprises in a bid to feel involved. Elton John is your godfather, not that you’ve ever met him in person.
Should the mood strike you, you’ll consider driving your rare sports car into the local village for an artisan coffee that was brewed using a Moroccan chinchilla’s anal gland sweat. Parking on double yellow lines is a mandatory affair, as paying the fine will give your assistant something to do for a while. When the wind blows, it whistles in your unkempt hair, saying things such as ‘Mummy, I fear the Aga is getting a smidge slow in its old age’ and ‘Papa, whence are we returning the boat to Monaco? I shall rather miss its charm’. You will never know the sweet joy of a £5 lottery win because the jackpot is always far less than your bank balance.
