Something disturbing has been happening at the grocery store as of late. Those morning meal whores at General Mills have gone over the edge in tarting up their flagship product, Cheerios. Speaking as a lifelong consumer of those boring yet satisfying circles of composite grain, this atrocity cannot continue. General Mills has launched a long line of flavored Cheerios varieties, especially over the past five years, and most of them are wrong in one way or another. I suppose it has been a profitable venture, but so were the freaking Transformer movies, so that's no excuse for messing with perfection.
When I talk about "perfection" I'm not referring to regular, plain Cheerios. I'm fairly certain that nobody except for three-year-olds like plain Cheerios. The only reason toddlers accept the plain ones as a snack food of all things is because at that age they've only eaten, what, like five things ever. They don't comprehend that they're choosing to consume bland circles of grain that are, at best, reminiscent of tiny, stale bagels. Oh, but everyone grows up and learns what's really going on with the Cheerios racket. Since 1979 the king of the Cheerios line has been the Honey Nut variety. They are, hands down, the most respectable breakfast cereal on the market and have been for 32 years. They're not too sweet, they stay crunchy for a decent amount of time and they taste more or less like what they're name suggests.
Honey Nut isn't the first attempt at flavored Cheerios, though. General Mills trotted out Cinnamon Nut Cheerios in 1976 but discontinued them a year later. Cinnamon would pop up again when General Mills decided to start screwing around with the recipe in 1988 in the form of the weak but passable Apple Cinnamon Cheerios. I'll admit, I enjoyed the novelty of the extra-crunchy, somewhat cobbler-flavored ACC when I was a kid, but I never thought of them as superior to Honey Nut. The most recent flavor also makes that spice the centerpiece. Cinnamon Burst Cheerios aren't bad, they're just kinda boring. The bar for cinnamon-flavored cereals is pretty high thanks to Cinnamon Toast Crunch. The only thing the cinnamon in CBC does is make the milk at the bottom of the bowl taste like cheap horchata, which is novel but isn't exactly something I'm looking for in a breakfast experience.
I'm also not too keen on these attempts to make Cheerios sound exciting. Cinnamon, Berry and Yogurt Burst sound ridiculous, not to mention that nobody buys Cheerios because they're stimulating. General Mills could make Crystal Methamphetamine Cheerios and they would still be a low-key way to approach the morning.
But the biggest offender has to be last year's newcomer, Chocolate Cheerios. This is just wrong. One of the major selling points of Cheerios is that they're reasonably healthy. Slathering them in the kind of cut-rate chocolate we Americans have tolerated in candy bars, drink mixes and, yes, breakfast cereals for decades undercuts that. And unless General Mills was trying to mimic the experience of eating soggy Cocoa Puffs, I'd say they failed. It's like Frosted Cheerios all over again.
When it comes to health, though, Cheerios stumbles when they try too hard. They failed to edge into the Wheaties market with the short-lived Team Cheerios on the eve of the 1996 Olympics and their current healthier-than-healthy variety Multigrain Cheerios is, by far, the most baffling cereal I've ever eaten. MC taste like absolutely nothing, so the experience of eating them is punctuated by the brain compensating for the blandness by randomly inserting flavors from its own memory archives. There's a corn-based Cheerio in the mix, so you may notice a fleeting Kix flavor that isn't really there, or maybe a nondescript sweetness that is also entirely imaginary. Somehow, General Mills has made a cereal less flavorful than plain Cheerios. That's some sort of Nobel-worthy accomplishment in chemistry.
The point is, General Mills needs to dial back its variety binge concerning Cheerios. Honey Nut remains perfectly delicious and popular. I really don't need dried fruit and oat clusters in the mix.