The Great Cereal Conspiracy

As the post communist China* embraces wanton globalisation, an influx of western concepts are gradually filtering into daily life, the best of which, of course, is western food.

Don't get me wrong, I do love Chinese cuisine (except cantonese food which is manky). I could happily gorge on pork and celery dumplings until the end of time, but always there remains a deep yearning at the pit of my soul for even half a slice of decent bread with some nice irish butter.

As the big cities in China grow more and more cosmopolitan, and as the newly established middle class - and also the newly established filthy stinking rich class - get out more, western food is growing ever popular. In Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin, foreign restaurants and deli's are popping up like nobody's business.

And so it comes to pass that western cereal is finally moving out of the uber expensive foreign food stores - 70 kuai for some coco pops? I think not! - and into the more mundane Chinese supermarkets.



It may only be a few brands for now, but Kellog's is moving its flagship cereals into a supermarket aisle that until recently housed but a few bland nestle samples and a selection of oats. Cornflakes and Frosties, together again!

However, no silver lining comes without a cloud, and Kellog's are being very shrewd concerning the way their product is packaged; in true asian tradition, the cereal comes in individually packaged portions. Call me a fat bastard if you will, but I like my cereal shovelled into a bowl and then drowned in a sea of ice cold milk.

From the face of it, it would seem Kellog's are bent on saving money. "5 sachets" one reads. Surely a handsome amount of cereal for such little money? But NO. The only thing 5 sachets does is to multiply the air inside 5 times, detracting actual cereal room and keeping cereal levels at a depressingly low level. If these bright boxes of cereal weren't so damned cheap to begin with, we would have a problem.

As the price is not so high, we are faced with a more disturbing reality. What these individual packages equate to is yet another form of consumer control. They, 'the man', are saying to us, 'the consumer', how much we are allowed to eat at any given time. "You can have but one 30 gram portion of cereal. You can't have two, because that's just too much, and there is no point having one and a half because who's going to eat that other half. 30 grams it is."

One can only guess how high this goes in the Chinese government. Once the nation is hooked on cheap western styled breakfast cereals, there is no telling how far the mind manipulation and plebian control will go. World domination, surely, can not be that far away.

I will continue to eat these cereals. For now. But at the same time I will be refusing to conform to the 30g sachets, and squinting with determined defiance at all attempts the Kellog-PSB super alliance. Together we can fight the beast.

When they come, hide the spoons.

(*let's face it, there ain't nothing communist about China save for the repressive leanings of the red tape loving senile government)