Love It/Hate It: Generic Cereal

Organic Hemp Granola

Chris: As if granola didn’t evoke enough images of dirt-encrusted, tree-hugging hippies, they had to throw in “hemp” to alienate the non-Phish-listening sector of the health-conscious crowd. To the cereal’s credit, my roommate claims that if you aggressively consume all of the available Hemp Granola in the dining hall you can sort of get high. Or at least so full that you feel weird.

Andrew: Although Chris is probably right that this cereal tastes like a natural disaster in your mouth, I’d bet that it could be useful to make rope…or something…if you ever were lost in a forest or natural park. Hemp is supposedly pretty versatile. And as for the music Phish has created over the years…I don’t really listen to it, but the fact that they’re making it, I respect that.

Toastie O’s

Andrew: O-baby!   Cheerios sounds like you’re eating some sort of British export, and we can’t have that. War of 1812 anyone?  Meanwhile, I dare anyone to describe to me a food that includes the word “toasted” or its derivatives and isn’t unbelievably good. Toast? Delicious. Toasted toast with chicken parm? Awesome. Lightly toasted BLT? Great. Case closed.

Chris: I think each “O” represents the score that this cereal would get on a taste scale ranging from zero to delicious. It tries to brag about containing “spelt, quinoa and kamut.” Quinoa was the Mother Grain of the Incas, but that was back in the day before delicious food had been invented.

Amazon Flakes

Andrew: The rainforests of the world have brought us some of the greatest discoveries of our time—the cure for cancer, the fountain of youth and now the inspired Amazon Flakes.

Chris: These taste like an occult rainforest tribe sacrificed one of it’s members, threw the corpse into the river to be consumed by piranhas, and then some shaman collected the remaining flakes of skin, dried them out and sold them in bulk to Harvard in return for a Harvard Crew rowing vessel that he could use to cruise around the Amazon and be the awesomest shaman around.

Marshmallow Mateys

Andrew: It shocks me that there hasn’t been a piracy-themed cereal before now. Sure, Lucky Charms might be the original, but if faced with a choice between gobbling down pink hearts and purple horseshoes or mighty anchors and other ship-related paraphernalia, the choice is clear. All I can say is, “Ahoy! Great-tasting cereal on the horizon!”

Chris: Lucky Charms are cool because you know that each marshmallow in your bowl was individually harvested by a sweet leprechaun. Meanwhile, Marshmallow Mateys can best be described as “magically disgusting.” Perhaps most upsetting is the line-up of inexplicable shapes employed by this cereal. The marshmallows are a total mystery, but seem to include a dead canary, a penis and a pink stegosaurus footprint.