Shreds sounds like a line of K-Mart branded skateboarding shoes.
In an effort to make one of the world’s oldest, most boring breakfast cereals slightly more palatable, General Mills has blasted pieces of shredded wheat with a metric f***ton of cinnamon, sugar, chocolate and peanut butter. It doesn’t help.
There are few breakfast cereals quite as wholesome as shredded wheat. It’s wheat cooked, tempered, rolled into sheets, cut into shreds, stacked and crimped into pillow-like cubes. That’s a whole lot of processing to make a foodstuff only slightly tastier than straight-up stuffing wheat plants in your mouth.
Every major cereal maker has its own version of shredded wheat – the name and process for making it is public domain at this point. But though they have tried frosting it, filling it with tiny dabs of fruit and chocolate or smearing the outside with yogurt, not one company has managed to make the dense and bland breakfast “treat” hip and happening.
Enter General Mills’ new flavour-blasted Shreds. Harnessing the brand recognition of Cinnamon Toast Crunch and the timeless combination of peanut butter and chocolate, good old GM has crafted a pair of cereals representing the pinnacle of shredded wheat coolness. It’s not a very high pinnacle.
“Whoa, We Did It” proclaims the back of the box. Beerus is not impressed .
Here’s the thing about shredded wheat. It’s heavy, heavy stuff. The two boxes shown in the picture up top were about three pounds each. Just holding one in my hands to open the bag was a chore.
Eating a bowl of shredded wheat is also a chore. No matter how good one’s intentions are or how much they think they’re craving the classic taste of whisk broom, by the third or fourth spoonful the task of chewing and swallowing the stuff is an arduous task.
By the sixth or seventh spoonful the eater is questioning all of their choices. The spoon raises from bowl to mouth mechanically. The jaw chews because if it did not, surely the wheat would fill the throat, the esophagus, the entire being. And it never ends. There’s always one more piece in the bowl.
Cinnamon Toast Crunch Blasted Shreds
Coating the tiny wheat squares with sugar and cinnamon only delays the process by a spoon or two. At first the warm sweetness grants hope – maybe this breakfast is going to be ok. But no amount of granular masking can hide what lies beneath. The Cinnamon Toast Crunch variety is literally caked with cinnamon and sugar. The flavour lingers as the sopping wheat shards slowly strangle your soul.
Peanut Butter and Chocolate Shreds
As for the peanut butter and chocolate variety, consider that classic flavour team-up ruined. It’s all the flavour of Reese’s Puffs, only instead of light and fluffy corn cereal balls, it’s coating a cardboard boat anchor one has to eat piece by piece.
If you need to, or worse want to eat shredded wheat, just eat shredded wheat. There’s no sugarcoating that experience, and if you try you just make people depressed.
Comments
9 responses to “Not Even Cinnamon Toast Crunch Can Make Shredded Wheat Good”
A review of American cereal by an American posted to the division of Kotaku where Weet-Bix are a national icon….
But Beerus is in the picture, so it’s still relevant pop culture, right? Riiiiiight?
You can buy shredded wheat in Australia. I’ve always enjoyed it personally, even though I don’t eat cereal of any sort these days (too easy to pig out)
Mini wheats are amazing! Especially the fruit stuffed kind (personally I liked blackberry). We actually used to eat them dry outta the box as kids, but much like fruit loops waaaaaayy too easy to pig out and go over board on
I remember liking the apricot and Blackcurrant ones as well, i used to eat them from the box as well
Sucks that they discontinued them though
Oh shit I’d forgotten about the blackcurrant mini wheats. Now I’m hungry.
Most of the Snaktaku and food articles by Mike Fahey get reposted here and 99% of them are for American foods or flavours don’t get here, but whenever you make a comment about them someone justifies it because “the articles are funny” or “we have similar products” or whatever. Personally, I would rather see the Morning Spoilers articles that get posted to Gizmodo for whatever weird reason instead of here instead of these food articles, but I guess that is never going to happen.
edit: why do edits always have to be moderated? It was just a spelling error. 🙁
Quite a few are available in Australia through USA Foods, although not these ones specifically. Thanks for the feedback though.
I love these things. So. Very. Much.
Beetus in a Box.