The breakfast club

(I actually wrote this for an already-published Sunday edit page anchor for the paper I work with. But I kinda liked it enough to want other people to read it!)

After many years of being told that I need to eat breakfast - something that is not included in family tradition – I finally succumbed. So, muttering direly about force-feeding and the like, I went to the grocery store to shop for breakfast foods. I had read about them, watched them being eaten on television by bubbly kids and a slew of vari-aged robustly healthy personages who all seemed to have a rollicking good time.

Having rejected the idea of making something for myself every morning, I settled on stuff out of a box, any box, as long as the food was fast, easy to make and had the basic minimum requirement of fibre, natural goodness and lack of sugar that my psyche and my digestive system thrives on.

So there I was, staring glumly at a panoply of brightly coloured boxes arranged on a long stretch of shelves, inviting me to pick them up. Each one invited me in for a taste, but only if I bought what looked like an alarmingly large amount of its contents. Some had ferocious animals on them, some promised the joys of chocolate and still others were no-nonsense plain foods which would turn me into a sprinting athlete in one helping. So much choice — to the novice breakfast eater, it was all too confusing.

I zeroed in on a neat little box of ‘new and improved’ muesli that had the goodness of fresh fruit in it, very little of the preservatives and additives that I abhor and no added sugar—that is what the label insisted. Best of all, it came with a little attachment - and any freebie is my idea of fun – a quarter kilo box of wheat bran which, I assured my rather doubtful father, would be great for adding fibre to our collective diet. Of course, I dignifiedly ignored his growls that if he needed more fibre he could chew on the ropes that he used to tie up the old newspapers.

The smile lasted right through until breakfast the next morning. The first spoonful of cereal with milk was novel, with the oat and wheat flakes still crunchy, the bran still crisp, the milk fresh and cool sliding down the throat. The second bite snagged a bit of apple, which felt a little like hard-set chewing gum and, in the company of a raisin, stuck itself determinedly to the back teeth. The third was rather less charming – the flakes had coalesced to the consistency of wet cement, the fruit had swelled but could never regain its natural form and the milk was thick with sediment and tasted vaguely of dust. And the fourth was abandoned altogether.

As for the bran – it made a fabulous bath scrub. I have never had such soft and exfoliated feet.