Blogandt!: Bigger, Better and Mini-er

After nearly 30 years, the love affair is over. I’m moving on. A clean break with the past. And it will start tomorrow morning, as I wake up and start a new life.

I’m done with Kellogg’s Frosted Mini Wheats.

I’ve been eating them since I was a kid, fitting since it’s the one cereal that bridges the gap between sugary kids fare and a sensible adult breakfast. Frosted Mini Wheats magically claim to be both healthy, and yet, covered in sugar. Powdered donuts wish they could get away with that. Those supposedly guilt-free revolutionary chips baked with Olestra didn’t work out. KFC once rolled out commercials claiming their chicken was a diet aid in the Atkins era since it was low in carbs—but they were forced to pull the ads. But Frosted Mini Wheats are frosted with sugar, not guilt, wheras Frosted Flakes make breakfast the least important meal of the day if you’re trying to stay healthy.

But if you think I’m about to go into some self righteous, “I realized frosted cereal is bad for you so I stopped eating it” diatribe, whatever. Go read Racer X Virtual Trainer for that advice. My problem is that Frosted Mini Wheats don’t taste good anymore!

First, I lament the loss of the real Frosted Mini Wheats, which were incidentally quite huge for something dubbed as mini. Unless you worked in the porn industry, you had to break them in half to even eat them, which is why Kellogg’s later launched “Bite Sized” FMW. But it makes me wonder, if a cereal piece is so big that is has to be broken in half just to eat, and yet is still called mini, what the heck is the size of a regular Wheat? Are we talking a bale of hay right here? And did they ever sell Frosted Wheats?

Today, the originals seem to be phased out, and the Bite Sized units are actually the standard items, which is like Jeep still calling the Grand Cherokee “Grand” even though they no longer make a regular Cherokee anymore. Or Coke still calling Coke “Classic Coke” after they had phased out New Coke.

Where was I?

Oh yes, the mini wheats became even more mini, and I suspect Kellogg’s changed the recipe, as well. Something just wasn’t right and I wasn’t enjoying the cereal anymore. After decades, I finally decided this morning that I wasn’t going to eat Frosted Mini Wheats for breakfast anymore (except for one more masochistic bowl this morning to finish off my last box—I never waste food, because that wastes money).

They're not just mini, they're bite sized mini.

But I’m left debating one last thing: did the cereal really change, or did I? Can I really blame Kellogg’s when it’s possible that I’m the one who developed a desire for something new? And how could I really call KFMW a constant? Yes, I had been eating them since the 1980s, but every box, every wheat, actually held the potential to be different. You’re supposed to have one lover for life. In this case, I had a million different ones, but they were all just the same size and shape.

I am easily confused by such evolution. When the supercross year begins in a few weeks, we’ll all be judging the riders and teams based on preset, previous standards. But they’re racing on a treadmill, as the tracks and competition change at a constant rate. When a rider’s results lag compared to where they were last year, we tend to think they’re not riding as well as they once did—maybe they’ve gotten lazy, or hurt. But it’s possible that the rider is simply the same as he was last year, and that the competition just got better. Essentially, in racing as in business, you have to get better just to stay in the same place.

In my last blog, I compared the rise and fall of Debbie Gibson and Damon Bradshaw as teenaged prodigies. They weren't the biggest thing going quite yet, but they seemed destined to break records once they hit their prime. But the teen years turned out to be the prime, and they couldn't produce the results in their 20s. But did they peak too soon, or did styles just change and evolve, and they failed to evolve with it? Maybe Gibson’s next few flop albums were just as good as the hits, but music tastes just didn’t want it anymore. And Bradshaw? He admitted that Jeremy McGrath stepped things up in 1993, but he just wasn’t motivated enough to step up himself and go for it. Did Bradshaw get worse, or just stop getting better? And remember, while it's easy to think evolution is simply getting bigger and better, the truth is that Kellogg's research has made them evolve the wheat to be more and more mini. And they keep trying to keep up. We now live in a world where you can by strawberry and blueberry flavored Kellogg's FMW. But I've moved on. I've evolved.

On the racing front, a new season is about to begin, and we’ll see who has gotten good enough to stay where they are, or better yet, gotten better enough to actually get better.

Frosted Mini Wheats, Debbie Gibson and Supercross 2012. The clues are all around you.