This story was expanded from a column that James wrote for the Daily Californian in 2006.

I was sitting on the steps of UC Berkeley’s Doe Library for tea one hazy morning in 2005 when a woman carrying a clipboard asked me to spare a moment for her petition. She informed me that the campus arcade would be closing at the end of the semester, and a group of artists were lobbying to convert the space into an expanded studio and workshop for the university. Being no enemy of the arts, I smiled and took the clipboard, casually asking, “What else do you think they’d do with the space?”

“Oh, I heard some company wants to open up a breakfast cereal bar in there so students can eat Fruit Loops on campus!” she replied with a roll of her eyes. That’s when I slipped my pen behind my ear, put the blank petition back into her hands, and broke my first heart. Like many Americans, I grew up on industrial breakfast cereal, and, like many Americans, I tend to place the value of cultural expression light years below my unfettered freedom to eat.

My relationship with cereal began before I could read. On the watch of two working parents, childhood mornings were a time of perfunctory action, largely robbed of bacon and eggs. In my household, hearty breakfast foods were as rare as diamonds (which we only ate about once a month). I thus grew up associating breakfast with the almighty bowl, and continued to rely on brand-name cereal for my morning sustenance until the age of 17.

During my first year of college, while my peers were breaking the boundaries of activism, alcohol and sexual liberation, I used my newfound freedom to dive spoon-first into the virtual theme park that is America’s breakfast cereal enterprise. The presence of eight varieties in the dorm dining commons alone saved me from many a night of “Asian BBQ Pork.” And with Safeway just a short bus ride away, there was nothing stopping me from packing a bowl of comfort in my room whenever I felt the need for companionship that only a giant talking rabbit could provide.

I began to stockpile, settling into the habit of having at least one box of “healthy” cereal, one box of children’s cereal and one moderate choice on hand at all times. Supermarket runs became quests for the holy grain. At last, on the night of May 18, 2005, I achieved a monumental task: With a small bowl of Kellogg’s Tiger Power, I consumed my 101st brand of breakfast cereal and drowned the hopes of one forlorn artist in a cascade of leftover milk sludge.

Woe is he who manages to fall from this kind of grace. Not long after I became a five star General Mills enthusiast, my body began to succumb to the soggies of lactose intolerance. The increasingly permanent affliction wasn’t enough to cripple my dairy intake, but surely enough to pair milk with stomach cramps and turn my spoon from the honey nut to the steel cut. Not to be bothered by milk substitutes – sadly, chocolate milk is not a milk substitute for the intents and purposes of the lactose intolerant – I all but eliminated breakfast cereal from my diet.

The pain of my loss was allayed by the opportunities it revealed. Grits began to make more 9:00 a.m. cameos. Yogurt, granola and honey with fresh fruit brought a newfound sense of richness and freshness to my breakfast table. Steel cut oats filled my bowl with hearty, whole grain sustenance. While studying in Russia, I started my day with a pot of grecha, flanked by thick slices of tomato, cucumber and bologna. Upon my return to America, I discovered the true joy of eggs over medium, their yolks cooked just enough to waft over a piece of toast without flooding the entire plate in one sideways forking. Having given breakfast short thrift for a brief lifetime, I handed my undivided attention over to the meal as a proper prologue to any day worth digesting.

The current star of my lactose free breakfast lineup is omurice, an elegant dish introduced to me by none other than Tampopo. The whole of Tampopo is dedicated to cultivating an enlightened perspective on seemingly mundane foods, and at no point is this dedication more straightforward than the two minute vignette in which Japan’s precursor to Reginald Cousins breaks into a restaurant kitchen on behalf of a hungry child.

I’ve come across many iterations of this East Asian staple. Some recipes call for the inclusion of fresh meat and vegetables. Others demand the stark comfort of Spam. My own rendition of omurice rejects all recipes that involve meat, freshly cut ingredients or anything else a homeless man wouldn’t have the luxury of stealing. I simply fry some fully cooked rice (preferably Korean brown rice), tossed with ground peppercorns, splashed with Heinz and kicked by Sriracha. A quick two-egg omelette, mixed and folded in the pan, lies atop the rice. One slice down the middle for ketchup, and breakfast is served with zero pain to my digestive system.

I’m ultimately thankful to lactose intolerance for pushing me off the cliff of fortified cereal, but in learning to make my breakfast fly I haven’t lost sight of my sugary roots. Thanks to illustrator Brendan Jones‘ epic web comic, Breakfast of the Gods, my cravings for Count Chocula, Cap’n Crunch and Honey Nut Cheerios are as ravenous as ever. In populating an iconic non-plot with deftly rendered cereal mascots in gloriously stylistic panels, Jones has managed to capture the heart of America’s food marketing fixation without taking bids from irony or crassness. His tongue-in-cheek elevation of cartoon spokespersons to heroes and villains serves as both lampoon and uplift for those of us who will never connect with the newest form marketed manhood as sincerely as we have with a talking, musatchioed, cookie burgling dog.

Having followed the BOTG yarn since its inception in 2006, I’ve savored its every spot-on swing at the box top behemoths of my youth and will be sad to see its craving inducing story come to a close in the coming months. Omurice, oats, grecha and the other members of my new morning family may be more nutritious and tasteful than Cinammon Toast Crunch, but, but they’ll never be as emotionally satisfying. Or as innocently racist.

Share this story. Stay hungry.

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This entry was posted on Monday, June 1st, 2009 at 6:00 am and is filed under None.