Cold Cereal

Most of the time its a hot breakfast around here: eggs, whole grain toast, grits, hashbrown potatoes, whole grain pancakes, hot cereal such as steel cut oats. By noon we all will have done enough physical work that we will be in deficit on our calorie intake even with an extra bit of butter and jam. Heck, we get more exercise than the pitiful minimum recommended for three times a week when we walk down to the road to check the mail.

But this was a warm morning and I decided to opt for cold cereal. It might be of interest because it is the meal we have here that draws to the largest extent from larders other than our own.

There are several excellent blogs which examine the effects of a dwindling world oil supply and they have covered the fact that it takes a staggering amount of middle eastern oil to put a meal on the American table. The suggestions offered for minimizing the oil content of food is to buy locally, and failing that, buy in bulk. The meal described here is not oil free, but it is oil-light.

The very worst food deal of all is boxed cereal. It is expensive, wasteful of resources, and is a nutritional disaster area. The only mitigation of this last is the very expensive whole grain twigs and acorns type cereals. Don't mistake these with the granola-cruncher cereals which are heavy with hydrogenated oils. Rather the Healthier-than-Thou boxed cereals with whole flaked grains, dried fruit, nuts, seeds, dates, etc. are not that bad nutritionally. But their packaging, transport, and retailing hog up a great deal of resources and they are expensive often costing around $5 for 8 to 10 ounces. Let's go with 10 ounces and base a serving on 2 ounces of cereal. That's 50 cents a serving even before you pour on the milk.

The large bowl in the above picture is seven grain cereal, sold steamed and flattened much like Quaker oats. It costs abut $27 for 50 lbs. which makes a 2 ounce serving 7 cents. From left to right are jars of cereal garnishes: sunflower seeds, dried blueberries, dried peaches, dried wineberries, all from the farm. Then there are raisins and dates which were purchased as well as the smaller bowl of coconut which, of course was also purchased. The dates were $6 for 5 lbs and the raisins about $4 for 5 lbs. The coconut was also bought in bulk but I don't recall the price. Wasn't much. So my 2 ounce serving of Freeman's Cereal is a little less than 2 ounces of grain and some fruit and seeds and such makes up the difference. That might nudge the cost up to 8 cents.

There's the milk and a little sweetener too but we produce those things ourself. At any rate you are going to add those to the Healthier-than-Thou cereal as well.

The expense of our food, as well as its abuse of our resouces and dependence on petroleum, is often much more a function of the packaging and retailing than the food itself. Don't think of cold cereal as that box in the grocery store that you reach for and have one or two meals. Think of your cold cereal as a continual affair throughout the year, or longer. When fruit is available cheap or free or growing down the street on that neglected strip of land, gather it and dry it. Overripe fruit dehydrates wonderfully. Don't buy your raisins as a scant handful in cardboard box of cereal, rather buy five or ten pounds at once. Properly stored dried fruit lasts for years.

Sometimes we have flaxseeds, grain middlings, walnuts, hickory nuts, dried bananas (from overripe bananas the produce stand gives us free), wheat germ, malt, okara, roasted soybeans, and all manner of other things with our cold cereal. The flaked grains are good the way they are, but this morning I toasted them in a skillet and toasted the coconut as well.

The first and most effective step away from Babylon's oil soaked food is not to move out to the wilds as I have done. Rather it is to pass by the over processed, over packaged foods and plan on a wider scale than the next meal.