Friday, March 28, 2008

Breakfast surprise

Have you ever had one of those unexpected shocks or surprises that makes your stomach feel all fluttery and sends mild shock feelings shooting down your arms? I think that feeling is related to the adrenaline rush as your body responds to the unexpected. It's trying to decide all at once; fight or flight? Well that happened to me this morning over breakfast. I've always been a Grapenuts lover; the crunchy little nuggets full of nutty wheat flavor. Natural whole wheat, too, so it must be good for me. As a child I even liked Grapenuts. You can imagine my thrill when I found them at Costco in the economy size box. The worst thing about Grapenuts is remembering that they are very dense and the serving size is just 1/2 cup. But anyway, back to this morning...

We were having cereal this morning and my choice was Grapenuts. We're using rice milk instead of regular cow's milk, just to see if we have any health benefits, so that was all I put on my cereal. A "naturally" great start to the morning I thought. I was eating along when I noticed a very small stickish looking thing in my cereal. Now when you eat a more natural cereal you expect that small stickish looking things might sometimes be found in your bowl, so I was not alarmed, but I did remove it to the napkin and continued eating. Just out of boredom I started playing with the stickish looking thing with my finger and I discovered that it kind of had an underbelly and little legs on the back side. Ew, I thought, I'm glad I didn't eat that. Technically, I guess it is natural, too, but not something I planned into the meal. I took a more careful look at my bowl, digging around and making sure there was nothing else in there. Since I didn't see anything else I decided that I must have dodged a bullet and I continued eating. (Now at this point I'm sure Andrew is reading this and shaking his head, guessing the ending of the story and thinking that I should have thrown it all out at the first sighting of the stickish looking thing. But he's not always right and I do love Grapenuts so much). Several bites later, there it was, another stickish looking thing. I quickly picked it out, confirmed it was a relative of the earlier discovery, and began further digging through the cereal. How could this be? I looked thoroughly and there was nothing! I had to figure out if my precious Grapenuts would have to be wasted or if there was some other explanation for these little surprises popping up. I looked around the room and found no obvious source. I thought maybe they were dropping out of the light fixture while I wasn't looking. Nope, it was clear. I tried the rice milk box, which I knew was silly since they are all sealed up, but still I needed to check every other possibility. The rice milk was fine. Finally I pulled out the Costco sized Grapenuts box that was 1/4 full. I looked inside and immediately saw, there at the bottom, two more stickish looking things, but these two were moving around and had tiny wings. There was that feeling, the fluttery rush of adrenaline and mild shock in my arms; fight or flight? More like gag or puke in this case. Even as I write about the discovery I can feel the fluttery adrenaline feeling again. Or is it the stickish looking things I probably ate squirming around? At any rate, I'll have to buy some more Grapenuts, that box is in the trash! I finished breakfast with Kashi Go Lean, it's "sticks" are part of the cereal and they are much larger so there would be no confusion. The moral of the story... just because it's "natural", doesn't mean you should eat it.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Why no pics today? I wanted to SEE the "little sticks".

Anonymous said...

I thought this one you should just take my word for it. :)

Lord, lift me above my own narrow horizons, that I might fulfill your true vision for me. - B.J. Hoff