The PopCult Cereal Bowl

TINY FRUITY CUTIES
Sweetened Corn & Oat Cereal
sold exclusively at Trader Joe’s
$3.99 for a 16 Oz. box

So I’ve been writing PopCult for 20 years now, and this is the first entry in “The PopCult Cereal Bowl.”

I have written about breakfast cereal in the past. I am known to wax rhapsodic about the recently-discontinued Quisp (AKA: The food of the gods), and earlier this year I wrote about a limited edition orange-cream flavored Captain Crunch. I’m sure that I probably mentioned the monster cereals at some point over the last two decades, but this is the first time I’ve sat down with a bowl of cereal intent on writing a review.

How did we get here? In this week’s Monday Morning Art, I posted a pencil drawing of my friend, Pixie, who lives in Liverpool, England (currently). When Mel and I travel, we send Pixie photos of cool and/or funny stuff. Pixie’s dealing with a lot of heavy issues in her life, and we figure that, if we can give her a smile or a little diversion, then at least we’re doing something to help our friend.  At some point I’ll probably run a photo essay of Mel’s “Travelling Squidward (and Plankton)” series of photos we’ve sent Pixie in recent months.

But for the rest of the story, I have to go back to our June trip to Chicago. Now, we love going to Chicago, and only an evil and insane fool would think that it’s some kind of battleground. We had a wonderful trip and stayed at a new hotel (for us), The Hotel Versey, which was really cool and fun.

Seriously, the weather was perfect. We both felt like walking a lot and we had an L stop less than half a mile away. Also, across the street there was a Trader Joe’s.

You may know Trader Joe’s as that grocery store that we’ll never get in Charleston. Other people know it as “Aldi for rich people.” We decided to go poke around and see what they had.

To be fair, they had a lot of cool stuff, and it wasn’t as insanely expensive as we had been led to believe.

But I grabbed a photo of a silly box of cereal because the name was goofy and I sent it to Pixie.

And she responded with “Oh my god! You have to buy a box and write a review!”

And since it seemed like a really good idea, we went back and picked up a box.

And that box sat in Mel’s luggage from June until Tuesday morning, when I remembered it was there while trying to decide what to write about in PopCult for Wednesday.

You can probably guess where this is going.

So…how is it?

First of all, the expiration date isn’t until next January, so it was still plenty fresh enough to eat.

The cereal itself probably qualifies as what some boring people dismiss as “candy cereal.” I have to be honest and admit that it’s the only kind of cereal I’ll eat.  My favorite breakfast food is warmed-up whatever I had for dinner the previous night so I don’t make a big deal out of buying cereal.  If a cereal is bland and flavorless, like pretty much any cereal that doesn’t have a cartoon mascot or a brightly-colored box, then I have no use for it.

Life is too short to eat a cereal with a taste that’s indistinguishable from the box it comes in. If you like bran or flakes or granola…you may have my share. I’ll pass.

I’m happy to report that Tiny Fruity Cuties is quite tasty. It is naturally flavored and colored with vegetable-based dyes, so parents can pretend it’s somewhat healthy. It’s actually a little higher in sugar and much lower in dietary fiber than Kellogg’s (American) Froot Loops.

None of this is as important as how it tastes. Nobody should eat candy cereal as part of a regular diet. It’s only good as an occasional treat. If you try to live on this stuff you have more problems than reading a cereal review can solve.

As soon as I cracked it open, I noticed the very nice and somewhat nostalgic waft of fruity goodness coming out of the bag. It reminded me of the way Froot Loops or Trix cereals smelled when I was a kid. Nowadays they smell more like some kind of chemical cocktail to me. This was a nice surprise.

As I said, Tiny Fruity Cuties is quite tasty. It’s got a natural fruit flavor–sort of a blend, like a fruit punch or something. There are discernable notes of grape and cherry, and just a hint of lemon.

The texture is crunchy, but not the type of crunchy that shreds the roof of your mouth like Captain Crunch does. The cereal has two shapes–sort of a banana and sort of a raspberry cluster.

There is no hint of banana flavor, as far as I can tell. The banana-shaped pieces are colored yellow and orange, and the cluster pieces are purple and a reddish-magenta.

I have no idea how it behaves in milk because I haven’t eaten milk with cereal since I was maybe four years old.

It was $3.99 for a 16 ounce box when we bought it. That’s comparable to, or maybe even a little less than your typical brand-name candy cereal.

It is a little carb-heavy, but you’re not going to eat this stuff as health food.

I find myself wondering how it would work crushed, mixed with butter, and used as the crust for a cheesecake.

All-in-all, Trader Joe’s Tiny Fruity Cuties is a nice, fruity treat of a cereal. It’s not super-healthy, but it tastes great and can scratch that nostalgic itch you might have for the kind of cereal you liked when you were a kid.

Of course, it’d be a hundred times better if it came with some kind of plastic toy or other small prize.