Review: Maple & Brown Sugar Life Cereal
I used to be big into breakfast cereal. I maintained a Seinfeldian library of cereals on top of the refrigerator and held strong opinions about their relative strengths and weaknesses. I typically ate a bowl in the morning and then a coffee mug full at night, to be washed down with liquor.
Ultimately, I quit cereal, because men over 40 do not need to consume a giant bowl of sugar and fat every morning. But every now and then—let’s say twice a year—I pick up a box at the supermarket, just for kicks. It has typically been Life, which has been my favorite cereal since its Mikey-fueled rise to prominence in the nineteen-seventies.
Life is composed of three-quarter-inch square matrices of what used to be whole grain oats, but now includes “corn flour, whole wheat flour, and rice flour.” Original Life has a mild, sweet flavor and a fine crunchiness that gives way, in the mouth, to a kind of gritty paste. (That sounds gross but it’s actually delightful. I mean, everything turns to paste in your mouth.) My favorite part of any box of Life has always been the bottom, where the last few fully intact units of cereal reside in a debris dune of sugar crystals and World—Trade-Center-ruins-like broken lattice. It was always my habit, when starting a new box, to simulate bottom-of-the-boxness by crushing the dry cereal down in the bowl with my fist, then adding more cereal on top, making for a really dense and complicated structure. Top it off with organic 2% and you’re good to go.
I’ve never been a great fan of Life’s several historical variants, though I might occasionally have enjoyed Cinnamon Life now and then, in my youth. The others, which appeared and vanished in a depressing orgy of attempted diversification in the mid-2000’s, were just garbage. Apparently there’s a Multigrain Life now, but I’ve never seen it. This week, though, I impulsively bought a box of the most recent iteration of the cereal, Maple & Brown Sugar Life. (The ampersand is Quaker’s, not mine.)
OK, let’s talk about the box for a second. First of all, the new logo is shit. It’s been shit since 2005, when the original flat multicolored lowercase letters, closely spaced on a jaunty incline, were tarted up with 3D lighting effects and wimpy serifs. And then it got worse a couple of years ago when they added gradients and changed the typeface to some kind of deformed Helvetica variant. So, there’s that. Then, the concept of this cereal in general: if you’ve got maple, do you need brown sugar? I mean, why not just call it Maple Life?
This impression is strengthened when you open the box and a nauseating wave of mapleness comes wafting out. I mean, it’s like inhaling some flavor chemist’s master’s thesis. It’s unimaginative and way too strong, and this is coming from a guy who has routinely tapped maple trees and reduced sap to syrup in a pot over a roaring March fire. (And no, I’m not going to write about that, what kind of blog do you think this is?) That smell is far milder than the smell of this cereal, which contains a lot less maple syrup. None whatsoever, I assume.
You might hope that the actual flavor of the cereal would be less intense and cloying, but it isn’t. If anything, it’s worse. I’m not detecting any brown sugar, either; either way, the stuff is far too sweet. Honestly, I am extremely disappointed in this cereal, particularly because it could have been quite good, if they’d chosen subtlety for a change. It’s particularly vexing because Maple & Brown Sugar Life is poised to become the longest-lived variant, after Cinnamon, suggesting that people actually like it. You don’t want your breakfast cereal to amplify your misanthropy, but that’s the situation we’re looking at here.
Two stars.
★ ★
