𝗦𝘂𝗴𝗮𝗿 𝗦𝘂𝗴𝗮𝗿, 𝗛𝗼𝗻𝗲𝘆 𝗛𝗼𝗻𝗲𝘆
- Patrick Ashley
- May 4, 2024
- 5 min read
It’s a wonder we ‘70s kids weren’t a bunch of juvenile, obese, toothless diabetics, with the diet we consumed; I hope it wasn’t just me.
Sugar was everywhere, and soda had a lot of it, especially my favorite, 𝘔𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘵𝘢𝘪𝘯 𝘋𝘦𝘸. Seems like you’d have one sip, and your body would be flush with energy, like a nuclear power plant that just came online. Heaven help the poor parent that gave their kid a soda after dinner - they’d be up until two in the morning, the kid being all hopped on sugar and caffeine. It was the perfect soda for summer, with its lemon-lime tang, and all the caffeine you needed as you’d right your bike around the ‘burg.
I can even recall a teaspoon of sugar being a remedy for hiccups. No better ever did a medicine taste. I’m sure it was also in legitimate medicines, such as cough syrup, maybe disguised as its vegetable cousin, corn syrup.
Breakfast as a kid back then basically consisted of grain products - usually corn - that were loaded with sugar, or some similar sweetener, perhaps honey, if you were trying to “eat better” because honey is much better than sugar for you, the way red wine is better for you than gin. They would also throw in marshmallows, chocolate, or cinnamon to entice us even more.
It was quite the change in a product that the Kellogg brothers started as a health food for their sanitarium patients in the late 1800s with the introduction of 𝘊𝘰𝘳𝘯 𝘍𝘭𝘢𝘬𝘦𝘴.
I blame nutritionists for the rise in kids’ pre-sweetened cereals; their research demonized every breakfast food we traditionally enjoyed. Eggs? Too much cholesterol; you couldn’t put butter on your toast because butter is fat, and fat makes you fat (so they said). Bacon was full of salt and nitrites; ditto for sausage. Kids didn’t drink coffee, and orange juice was basically liquid sugar. There you have it - dry toast and a glass of water - that would be the only meal to satisfy nutritionists!
That didn’t fly, not with pre-sweetened cereals available. Kids weren’t exactly into eating healthy and our parents would rather just throw a bowl of cereal at us in the morning than cook something legitimate. Strange, but many of them - back then and today - think a Pepsi (or coffee) and a cigarette was a fine way to start your day.
There were dozens and dozens of cereals to choose from. Something as boring as 𝘊𝘰𝘳𝘯 𝘍𝘭𝘢𝘬𝘦𝘴 to 𝘏𝘰𝘯𝘦𝘺 𝘚𝘮𝘢𝘤𝘬𝘴 which was literally 50% sugar. I think it’s safe to say that American kids, in the ‘70s, were the lead supporting demographic of the Hawaiian sugar cane trade.
Cartoons on Saturday mornings - our favorite time of the week - were lousy with cereal commercials; if there was a cartoon character, they would likely be pushing a cereal. Rocky and Bullwinkle were essentially Sugah pimps, they did so many commercials for a variety of cereals.
Makers of these products always tried to satisfy nutritionists, and assuage parent’s guilt by saying that their cereal was “part of this complete breakfast” and showing a bunch of traditionally decent breakfast foods, like orange juice, grapefruit, and toast. Ha, that was funny, like you’d get all that at breakfast when you woke up 20 minutes before and had to get on the bus in 5 five minutes. There was also the “fortified” trickery; throw some vitamins in there, making it better. An IV drip of insulin, maybe, but a little smattering of vitamins, ha!
In the cereal wars, one of their main weapons was prizes. Admit it, as you went down that cereal aisle with your mom, the prize was often a factor that weighed heavily on your decision about what to grab and throw in the cart when she wasn’t looking. Frogmen that actually dove down in the water and came back up; magnets of characters, flexible records, wristwatches, cars, wallwalkers - 𝘈𝘭𝘱𝘩𝘢𝘉𝘪𝘵𝘴 even had a terrarium! If you bought several boxes of cereal, you pretty much had a mini Christmas. I don’t think they push the prizes to kids anymore; maybe they’ve started marketing to the ‘70s kids, now their adult consumers, and orienting prizes towards them - “𝘍𝘳𝘦𝘦 𝘤𝘦𝘭𝘭 𝘱𝘩𝘰𝘯𝘦 𝘸𝘩𝘦𝘯 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘴𝘦𝘯𝘥 𝘪𝘯 120 𝘣𝘰𝘹 𝘵𝘰𝘱𝘴!”.
And of course, when we got home from the grocery store, we’d have to find a big bowl to dump out all the cereal to find the toy, which was never at the top of the box, then try to get the cereal back in the box, making a mess, and finding the box now bulged in the middle, and you couldn’t close the flap top. As for me, I’d shove my hand in, and toss the box this way and that to move the cereal around trying to find my buried treasure. That’s assuming you could get the bag the cereal was in open, to begin with; those wax bags wouldn’t pull apart easily unless you had a Marine for a dad, and those mylar ones would just rip right down the side all the way. I don’t think the CDC puts ebola viruses in tighter containers.
There were the sampler collections you could get - 9 little boxes of different cereals. Now, ordinary folks would just open them up, pour them into a bowl, and go that traditional route as such - but us more adventurous types would cut open the side of the box and bag, and it eat that way, like we were on a camping trip, or in an artillery unit in Vietnam.
Cereal is still big. Here in Rochester, they briefly had a 𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘶𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘵 featuring cereal. Yes, you could order all these different kinds of cereal, and they also had items that had the cereal as a main ingredient, such as pancakes with 𝘗𝘦𝘢𝘯𝘶𝘵 𝘉𝘶𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘳 𝘊𝘢𝘱’𝘯 𝘊𝘳𝘶𝘯𝘤𝘩 in the batter. Supermarkets have whole aisles dedicated to breakfast foods - one side being all cereal. There is even a Facebook page group - 𝘊𝘌𝘙𝘌𝘈𝘓 𝘉𝘖𝘟𝘌𝘚 𝘈𝘕𝘋 𝘗𝘙𝘐𝘡𝘌𝘚 𝘜𝘕𝘓𝘐𝘔𝘐𝘛𝘌𝘋 50'𝘴 60'𝘴 70'𝘴 80'𝘴 -𝘊𝘜𝘙𝘙𝘌𝘕𝘛 with over eighteen thousand members dedicated to the 𝘵𝘰𝘺𝘴 𝘢𝘭𝘰𝘯𝘦. Yes, they do sell them on eBay.
How many of us did a lot of reading at breakfast? Another thing these boxes of sugar with some corn were good for. Trivia, puzzles, and jokes would be on there, and enticements about clipping parts of the box off and sending in some money for a toy, a cereal bowl, and several other things. Of course, they were also good for barricading yourself in your little world away from your annoying siblings as you gorged yourself on your sugar high.
Great, now I want Peanut Butter Cap’n Crunch….!
Some cool YouTube vids:
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