My childhood can be divided into two periods. Until I was eight or nine our breakfast diet was pretty typical for kids of the time. The heavily sweetened cereals of today hadn’t been introduced yet. The pre-sweetened cereals were pretty much limited to the newly introduced Sugar Corn Pops, Sugar Smacks, and Sugar Frosted Flakes and their spokesmen were Wild Bill Hickok (as rather unconvincingly portrayed by Guy Madison), Cliffie the Clown, and Tony the Tiger. The selection of breakfast cereals was mostly oatmeal, Hot Ralston, shredded wheat, Grape-Nuts, and the three pre-sweetened cereals mentioned above.
Then my mother discovered Adelle Davis and our lives would never be the same. You could distinguish between the two periods as BAD (before Adelle Davis) and AAD (after Adelle Davis). If she’s before your time, Adelle Davis was a nutrionist and advocate who wrote several best-selling cookbooks, was a nutritionist to the stars in the 1940s, and advocated eliminating additives and sugar from food and using whole grains and fresh fruits and vegetables.
Gone were the BAD white bread, pre-sweetened cereals, and salt. AAD we ate Roman Meal (a mixture of whole wheat and flax seed), steel cut oats, whole grain bread, wheat bran, and Tiger Milk. Tiger Milk was a concoction of skim milk, bran, brewer’s yeast, blackstrap molasses, and I don’t recall what all else. When Adelle Davis prescribed Tiger Milk to W. C. Fields, he proclaimed it “excellent with gin”.
Skippy or Peter Pan peanut butter were replaced by the fresh ground, rather gritty but transfat-free stuff we searched out at healthfood stores.
With a childhood like that and not having children of my own you can see why complaints like this of nutritionally empty breakfast foods targeted at children are foreign to me. Doesn’t everybody eat a mixture of cut wheat and flax seed with blackstrap molasses for breakfast?
Most children in the U.S., then and now, have diets that are BAD. I recall all the breakfast treats you named, but I don’t remember Tiger’s Milk. Was it mixed into milk or o.j.? Or eaten in some other way? Those of us on the younger side of the family have nostalgia for Concentrate cereal, which may have come on later. It had something of the look and texture of wheat germ, and probably had wheat germ in it, but it was nutty and chewy, and helped hide the flavor of the wheat germ that Mama inevitably sprinkled on top.
Skim milk, orange juice, or both. I think that Mama and I were the only ones who would drink it. It was really repellent.
I liked Concentrate. I think that Kellogg’s introduced it around 1959 and continue it through sometime in the 1970s. It’s no longer made.
Susan Glenn:
BTW what did your boys eat when they were young? I’m guessing some compromise of granola, whatever was advertised on TV, and bacon and eggs.
Hey, any diet that includes Roman Meal is ok by me. Loved that stuff.
To answer your question, no.
Our grade school kids will eat either pre-sweatened cereal, a piece or two of fresh fruit, pop tarts, yogurt, or a hunk of cheese, plus Sunny D. The cereal gets them to consume some milk. They are reluctant breakfast eaters, probably following from their parents, so I’ve never been worried about their serving sizes.
I endured the identical oppression by Adele Davis.
I have one of two breakfasts: fresh berries with Greek yogurt, (70% of the time) or bacon and eggs. My son has a red Bull and a Zone Bar. (No criticism from those of you without kids: let’s see what you can get a teenager to eat.) My daughter has a single, sunny-side-up egg.
Tigers Milk was awful stuff, largely made of brewer’s yeast I believe.
I have one breakfast: one soy sausage link, one Egg Beater (seasoned with pepper, onion powder, and hot sauce), and a bowl of steel-cut oatmeal with a handful of berries.
Grits.
“For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.”
My most frequent breakfast is coffee, black.
The next most frequent is a granola bar from a box I keep at my office. And coffee, black.
So, its hard to encourage “breakfast, the most important meal of the day” virtues when you’ve got feet of clay.
I used to be a big breakfast eater – I now save that for the occasional trips to Denny’s and Waffle Sunday’s (a tradition in my family). Now I typically have coffee with some hot chocolate mixed in and a banana. Sometimes I’ll have an egg-beaters omelet or a bowl of cereal if I wake up really hungry.
My son (almost 7 now) likes his Life Cereal or cheerios. The daughter (8) will have a bagel or cinnamon bread or sometimes cereal. The toddler usually gets yoghurt and banana.
Overall my daughter is a very diverse eater. My son is a meat-and-starch-man and about the only veggie he will eat is peas. I can get him to down carrots and broccoli, but it takes some effort.
One thing that stands out to me in these comments is that one child is different than another child, and adults are different than children.
Take that, food police!!!
I can get him to down carrots and broccoli, but it takes some effort.
I could do that. If I had a gun.