Cornyphones and Cardboard Flamingos: A Green Consumer Reads His Breakfast

Recent figures released by the Cereal Action Council of America suggest that on any morning, approximately sixty million Americans are "enjoying a lovely bowl of cereal" (Klopfer 178). The rich diversity of breakfast products-hyper-sweetened Count Chocula, staid and venerable Shredded Wheat, along with the trusty, regularity-inducing All-Bransignifies the multicultural stewpot that is America. Despite the variety of breakfast products available at the market, however, there is one element almost all of them have in common: cartons featuring words and attendant illustration. Unlike that of other processed foods, cereal's packaging doubles as a source of entertainment. We don't read a burrito's wrapper after taking it out of the microwave, for instance, nor do we spend more than several seconds assimilating the valuable lessons on a box of Saltines. Cold cereal differs from other products in that it's the one packaged foodstuff we bring to the table, where we place the box before us and gaze at it with a sometimes trancelike fixity, thereby rendering ourselves captive audiences to messages that may be insidious in their rhetorical effect. This essay will focus on one "traditional" corn cereal product from a green perspective, to discover ways in which cereal literature-whether intentionally or not-is put as a cultural text of considerable authority, one whose pervasive presence at the table may contribute to people's view of themselves as superior to the land' and therefore free to plunder it immoderately. While growing up I never thought about rhetoric,2 and I certainly didn't consider cereal insidious. I liked cereal. It tasted good and gave me energy to walk the several blocks to Brockton Avenue school, where I would collapse in a species of hypoglycemic coma until the mid-morning sweet roll revived me. Furthermore, besides the dubious nutrition afforded by their contents, cereal boxes provided me with reasons for living, dangling before me a panoply of indispensable playthings unavailable at local retail outlets. For countless boom-babies, Battle Creek, Michigan was the Holy Land, promising exotic playthings aplenty for a quarter and a proof-ofpurchase. I rushed daily to the mailbox until that cardboard-encased novelty arrived: a frogman who alternately floated and submerged by some arcane interaction between bathwater and baking soda; a genuine Kellogg's Corn Flake Cornyphone that turned out to be an out-of-tune harmonica in yellow polythene molded to resemble an ear of corn. Despite the shameful cheapness of these wares, I was never disappointed and continued to read cereal boxes avidly, scouring them for the next geegaw on which I might squander my allowance. Nowadays, although I can get excited by Rice Krispies' offer of an "Exciting, Full-Color Poster Featuring World Series Tickets Throughout History," I must also take a more dispassionate view of things pop, in order to consider the rhetorical purpose and potential psychological effects in messages disseminated by the purveyors of mass consumables. To be honest, I never considered cereal literature a worthy subject of study-my area of academic expertise being the hydrological seduction and betrayal encoded in water themeparks 3-not, that is, until I faced my Kix the other day and found myself captivated, then horrified by the box's superficially innocent text. In most ways, this Kix box looks like every other thirteen-ounce Kix box that's ever been produced. The familiar canteloupe-orange background features the prominent KiX logo in blue, its oversized lower-case "i" dropped in jaunty subscript between two capital letters, thereby adding a touch of childlike wackiness to the presentation's overall spirit. As a concession to modern parents' health concerns, a band of red across the middle of the front panel bugles the promise, "Low in Sugar! Kids Love it!"' and a blue box in the bottom right-hand corner contains a rider: "No added colors/No added flavors/No preservatives. …