The Day Food Died
I remember it was 1960.
I had never been a great eater. I was told. I was always getting into trouble for not eating my food. I always went dessert less under the reigning mantra of ‘eat all your dinner or there is no dessert’, I always went dessert less. Not that I really cared. Bread and Butter Pudding again? Certainly not worth eating spinach over.
It wasn’t until years later that I figured out why I didn’t eat because mum wasn’t a great cook. Plus, she was cooking primarily for dad who only ate meat and three vegs. Dinner was chops or sausages (presumably we couldn’t afford steak) with potatoes (mashed), cabbage and carrots. Or potatoes (mashed) with beans and carrots. I could take you through the weekly menu, but you get the drift. Sometimes a slice of bread that you buttered yourself, but generally not because there were no preservatives in bread in those days so the morning loaf was like a brick come evening.
Breakfast was no better. Porridge didn’t turn me on; no matter how much brown sugar you shovelled on top. Oats were worse. Corn flakes were tasteless and the bananas were never ripe. Eggs and Soldiers I didn’t mind. As long as they were in my eggcup.
We were probably working-class typical. The only overweight person in school was Daryl, who was like a Tele Tubby; but everybody knew he had a ‘hole in the heart’. Whatever that was.
Then one day, unannounced, Coco the Monkey appeared on the breakfast table, which changed everything. I didn’t like the ‘just like a chocolate milkshake only crunchy’ concept but I found if you squashed the chocolate & sugar-laden rice bubbles on the bottom of the plate long enough the chocolate and sugar drained out into the milk. The tactic was to eat the soggy rice bubbles and you were then left with a chocolate milkshake to spoon up. Which in my 1960s world (pre-blenders, pre-Tupperware shakers) was to die for.
Breakfast ceased to become breakfast. It became a game.
Coco was transformational, not only did you get chocolate for breakfast (and your mother off your back) you got plastic toys and back-of-the-box games. And if I didn’t like the toy, like if it wasn’t Coco, I would double my serving to get through the box quicker. I was on a winner So was Mr Kellog. And mum. She didn’t have to do anything and I was eating.
That was my breakfast until I was 17. I tried Fruit Loops but even as a 10-year-old I knew there was something intrinsically wrong with breakfast being every colour of the rainbow and smelling like cheap bubblegum. Dabbled in Honey Smax but you could tell the honey wasn’t really honey; it was just sugar they made sticky.
They were blissful years, then I decided since I was old enough to drive a car I was a bit old for the Coco Pops spoon-squashing ritual and switched to peanut butter toast.
In the context of the time, and it still reverberates around the Supermarket today, it was a game-changer. With Coco leading the charge. The basics of nutrition were very poorly understood in the 1960s. I don’t think I knew what Nutrition Panels were until I was 20. I don’t think I read one until I was 40.
Anyway, to figure out Coco Pops was 30% sugar you had to do a bit of maths. Complicated by the fact that everyone talked calories but nutrition panels outside America are in kilojoules. With numbers that approximate the cost of a Mars Bar in Indonesian Rupiah.
The fact that protein and fibre were changed for sugar and empty carbohydrate was neither here nor there. game-changer. Out went the protein and in came the sugar. All 30% of it. Not that anybody worried. It broke the taboo that breakfast should really be food. And disgusting like porridge. Which then trickled into every food we ate. Plain was out and flavours were in.
Normally I block out Coco Pops memories. A harmless transition to a better world from the past. I glaze over if I happen to find myself in the Supermarket cereal aisle. Normally I don’t because they kindly mark it which tells me I don’t need to go there.
Meanwhile mum was getting up at 5.30 to make dad bacon and eggs before he went off to work which I sneered at as being old-fashioned and unhealthy.
And he came home and had his meat and three vegs for dinner. No dessert because that wasn’t his style.
And no weight issues. Never had to contemplate dieting, He would have lived a long healthy life without the beer and cigarettes.
