Cul de Sac by Richard Thompson for June 19, 2022

very nice, Alice, on that history lesson

It’s called “research”.

Haha, Alice seems to have pealed back the curtain, and yet is still seduced by the siren. Mom, those are just the bread crumbs of Hansel and Gretel, er, Alice and Dill.

There used to be good prizes in cereals in the fifties. Little plastic figures, little cowboy scenes that you could collect to build a tiny ranch. Good things that a kid would love. With the high cost of cereal today, couldn’t the manufacturers spring for a good prize in the cereal box?

I never cared much for the very sugary cereals when I was a kid, or the ones with chocolate or fruit flavors. I couldn’t stand Cheerios. But I’d put a spoonful of sugar on my Special K or corn flakes, so it probably wasn’t any better. I stopped doing that later.

Alice would probably get along fine with Calvin, who puts sugar on his Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs

One thing about going to a boarding school was that we didn’t watch TV, so we weren’t seduced by whatever ads there were in the mid-50s. Breakfast was a choice of hot cereal – usually oatmeal – or cold which was cornflakes. Take it or leave it.

Nothin’ worse than Halloween Froot Loops with marshmallows!

If you gave Alice, David Attenborough’s voice, you’d swear you were watching a nature show on the Discovery Channel.

Reminds me of a Roz Chast cartoon.

Isn´t it strange, the better a cereal claims it is for you the harder it is to eat and digest?

The reason they call it cereal is because you eat it one flake at a time. If you ate more than one flake at a time, it would be called parallel.

You can buy Lucky Charms Marshmallows Only in stores.

Years of watching commercials? She’s 6! But she has it right, or rather Richard does.

The stuff is amazingly bad

“Visual aids, mom! Sheesh.. do I have to explain everything?”

Like CALVIN & HOBBES, the cereals reflect a time earlier than the kids in the strip live in. ‘Sugar’ would have disappeared from cereal names long before Alice- or Calvin- were born. And some cereals had marshmallows right off the bat.

I like the duck. :)

The flakes were a cooking accident and originally used as an anaphrodisiac because Kellogg thought that sex would kill you. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Harvey_Kellogg

Great sociology, well-researched, but the idea that Alice could pay attention to anything but herself for more than about ten seconds is hard to believe.

Why, Madeline, is usually the hardest question to answer ;)

Surrrrrrrre, that’s what a 4 year old thinks about cereal.

Except for the living room litter, Alice has done some excellent research! She strips bare the truth of Cereal Marketing!

Only way most cerial is ‘healthy’ is by way of adding cows milk to it, remove the cerial (quickly), and drink the milk.