Sunday, November 18, 2012

Clusters Busters




















Welcome!
I’ve started this blog:
  • As a creative outlet
  • To try to do a little more writing
  • To share my love of cereal
  • To shoot my mouth off about things.

Things like the modern Honey Nut Clusters cereal. A warning, I’m about to pull back the curtain on some pretty shocking stuff, so click away if you’d rather not have your world ripped apart.

Clusters cereal was always a favorite of mine. Probably in my all-time top five. Sometime in the last 10-15 years or so it became impossible to find in my town, so I would pick up a box or two whenever I came across it in my travels. It was always expensive (which I accounted for the massive amount of nuts it contained), but it was a rare treat so I paid the cost.  A few years ago it seemed to have disappeared completely, and then one day I across a box at a local supermarket.

When I had a chance to chow down on a bowl I noticed something wasn’t right. It didn’t taste bad, but it wasn’t as good as I remembered. I first thought this was because I had built it up in my head and reality was pulling me down,  but as I continued to work my way through the box the feeling that something was off persisted. I consulted with my old friend the internet and found out this shocking fact: Honey Nut Clusters no longer contained any nuts. Not a single nut was packed into those once glorious clusters. Instead they had substituted them with “almond flavoring”.  The cereal built on the ravenous desires of squirrels doing whatever they could to secure it, had cut out all of wonderful nuts. And the price I paid for the box was still incredibly high. I’ve never felt so used and abused by a cereal before. General Mills puts out some great products, but on this point I’m calling shenanigans. If you are going to pull this kind of cost cutting measure, have the common courtesy to drop the price to the consumer and the word “Nut” from the box.

As a strange side note, my two minutes of research also turned up that in 2008 they put out a limited edition box with the name “Honey Nut Clijsters” and a picture of tennis player Kim Clijsters on the box. That’s so weird I can almost forgive them for the whole nut thing, almost.

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Thanks and dig in!