Nature's Path Heritage O's

Strolling through the local Whole Foods, I was carousing in the cereal aisle, bandying about and such, when perchance my eye caught a glimpse of Nature's Path Heritage O's. Normally, I would have forgotten it even existed and continued my search for the most sugary possible "health" cereal, but after walking away, I had to go back and buy the damn thing.

For some reason I was laughing—out loud—at the slogan stamped on the front of the box: "From the Ancient Grains Spelt, Quinoa & Kamut." Although I was at the time quite drunk and high, the concept of an ad campaign based around the novelty of eating grains that were popular 10,000 years ago seemed too nutty to resist.

I guess I've yet to find the path of enlightenment that prevents me from snickering at the Earth-First statements on an innocuous cereal box, such as: "Are you up for some diversity this morning?," "Environmental change is delicious," and my personal crowd-pleasing favorite, "Remember the Irish potato famine?"

The argument being that by eating grains that even the Mesopotamians considered old hat, we're somehow saving the world from a looming agricultural Armageddon. They even bring up acid rain, which was only marginally scary back in 1982, and at this point is as much of a painful 80s name-drop as randomly saying something like, "Hey, remember JM J. Bullock?!?" Neither reference deserves more than a passing wince.

And of course, I have no problem lumping global crises together with has-been actors, if both were trendy at a particular time. Why I continue to shop at Whole Foods with this attitude is confusing to everyone.

Despite the box's impassioned plea, and a flowery description of how they took two years to make what they optimistically call "ambrosia," Heritage O's tastes more like desperation than heritage (to me, heritage tastes like, say, well-packaged instant oatmeal). The crunchy little circles have next to no flavor, with a taste and texture somewhere between Cheerios, rice cakes, and a bland corn tortilla.

In milk, the lackluster quality gets even worse, reminding one how good a robustly non-historic cereal can be by comparison. To make up for the blandness, I added about a pound of synthetic cyber-honey and processed white cyber-sugar, rendering the official Organic Certification completely moot and putting a serious strain on my relationship with the Mesopotamian Ambassador, who threatened to sack Babylon and enslave the Abyssinian Viceroy.

At some point after that, the Micronaut Pharaoh took off in his Pyramid Car, and then I woke up, only to realize I was locked in the Mummy's Tomb, then I woke up again, because it was the old "dream within a dream" ploy – then the Mummy ate my entrails, because it wasn't really a dream after all.

But then I woke up for real this time, and vaguely recalled that somewhere in this article was supposed to be a bona-fide cereal review. Then I woke up for real for real.

Review by Crimedog