Chocolatey taste

Tom bought these by accident on a recent trip to the grocery store.

I ate Cocoa Puffs damn near every weekday morning of every year of elementary school, and more years of junior and senior high than I can count. (Weekends were more likely to offer up eggs/bacon/grits with toast or biscuits–or occasionally, pancakes!–prepared by one parent or another.) Cocoa Puffs and Nestlé Quik were the only way my mother could get milk into my body. I still don’t drink milk, though I occasionally will drink chocolate milk, but not by making it with powder.

What the heck is it with straw-using birds and rabbits? Is this subliminal cue why so many kids grew up to do cocaine in the 70s and 80s?

When we would visit Uncle Gerald’s family in Starkville, their grocery store didn’t sell Cocoa Puffs, so Aunt Lola bought Cocoa Krispies for me. Though I don’t eat a lot of cereal, I’ll still eat those when I’m in the mood for something out of the corn flake/shredded wheat/raisin bran range. Having eaten my first bowl from this box, Cocoa Puffs don’t seem to shred the inside of the mouth the way they used to. When I was growing up, that was a bonus feature because it kept everyone else in the house from wanting to eat my cereal.

In the ghost novel I haven’t worked on in years, my teenage character Emma eats Cocoa Puffs for that same reason. The mouth shredding is worth never having to share her cereal with her older twin sisters, who are the bane of her existence.