Let Them Eat Cereal (for Dinner)
What does food we eat, or rather can afford to eat, tell us about the society we live in
A couple of days ago, Kellogg’s CEO Gary Pilnick gave people strapped for cash a piece of advice: just ‘eat cereal for dinner.’
Well. Telling people to opt for a bowl of processed oats and sugar instead of a regular meal would’ve been (sort of) funny if so many people weren’t struggling to put food on their table today. But they are.
In the US, people are spending more of their income on food than they have in 30 years, and there’s been a sharp rise in food insecurity, with 1 in 8 households suffering from it. In the UK, where I live, the situation is even more dire: nearly 1 in 5 households struggle to get enough food.
And that’s thanks to, oh yes, companies like Kellogg’s and all the other food manufacturers controlling most of the things we buy, like Coca-Cola, Mondelez and General Mills, ramping up their prices. This, combined with all the other increases in the cost of living, has squeezed many consumers to the point where some will indeed have to consider eating cereal for dinner. Or skipping it altogether.
Actually, last year’s Wall Street Journal article did suggest something along these lines, only for breakfast. But that’s just one example of a whole litany of articles, videos and posts telling us that with the right mindset and lifestyle choices, we can all thrive, ahem, survive.
Money is tight? Just skip breakfast. Sniff an orange for lunch. Or eat something mouldy from the back of your fridge. And then have a bowl of cereal for dinner.
The food we eat, or rather can afford to eat, can tell us a lot about the society we live in. But sometimes, the story is a grim one.
Where I’m from, eating cereal — regardless of the time of day — wasn’t the norm when I was growing up.
That also certainly wasn’t the case for my parents, born in the early 1950s in Poland under Soviet rule.
And although the Soviets didn’t re-implement food rationing until the late 70s — having first been implemented during the Second World War — my parents and grandparents mostly had limited food options. Their diet consisted of potatoes and bread and potatoes and bread and occasional pieces of meat or eggs.
If you were lucky, you had dollars and could buy some ‘luxury’ Western goods like oranges, chocolate or… chewing gum. Or perhaps you had space to grow vegetables and fruit or raise animals. My paternal grandfather was (illegally) raising rabbits in his neighbourhood’s communal garden. My other grandfather was raising chickens in his shed.
The situation only got worse in 1976, when the USSR started rationing food, which, in the case of some products, lasted until its collapse. And so people were given monthly ‘food coupons’ that allowed them to buy a limited amount of different items, like a kilo of meat, for instance. My mother often tells the story of having to save up cheese coupons for several months before my brother’s birthday just to make him his favourite cheesecake.
In the 90s, things slowly started to improve, and the fall of the Iron Curtain separating us from the West meant we would finally have more foreign goods on our supermarket shelves. Still, these were pretty expensive, and my diet growing up was also mainly just bread and potatoes and occasional sausage. And if you felt like eating something sweet, you would wet a piece of bread and sprinkle it with some sugar. Just like my parents taught me.
It’s actually through the stories they told me about food that I’ve learned the most about the times they lived through.
During the Soviet Union, food told the story of scarcity, struggle and inequalities. (Because, yes, some people didn’t have to resort to raising and slaughtering their own chickens to survive.)
In the years after its fall, it was the story of gradual recovery and hope that tasted like chocolate and smelled like oranges.
Today, in the parts of the world that mostly didn’t have to worry about quantity and accessibility of food for a while, it has a story to tell, too.
One of the world’s most expensive foods is Japanese Wagyu beef, specifically the Kobe variety. It comes from a small number of farms in Japan raising cattle in quite a strict way, which includes giving them regular massages. And beer.
That’s why a burger with the Wagyu beef patty can cost up to $5,000.
But this might not seem like that much when you compare it with the price of a chocolate pudding shaped into a Fabergé egg and adorned with edible gold leaves sold at one English countryside manor for a measly… $35,000. Or the world’s most expensive tacos featuring wagyu beef, Almas Beluga caviar and black truffle cheese — which are also among the world’s most expensive foods — and served on a gold flake-infused tortilla for just $25,000 a serving.
If you have money, you can quite literally eat (and shit) gold and taste your way through the most creative and bizarre food creations to have ever existed.
Meanwhile, if you don’t, you’re being told to skip breakfast, have a bowl of cereal for dinner and consider eating mouldy food.
And if you dare to complain about feeling like a feudal peasant, you’re often told you wouldn’t even be in the place you are in right now if it wasn’t for your irresponsible and ‘extravagant’ lifestyle choices.
Millennials have long been mocked for buying all those avocado toasts and takeaway coffees, which has also been conveniently used as an excuse for why many of us can’t seem to afford to buy a house. (Oddly enough, the fact that house prices have grown exponentially faster than incomes doesn’t seem to hold as much sway as the avocado toast theory.)
More recently, an NBC article implied that younger generations struggle to save up because they spend too much money on ‘short-term purchases like groceries.’ Ah yes, if only we didn’t need to continuously buy food to keep our bodies up and running. Such an inconvenience. Can you imagine how much we could save up if we just how to photosynthesise instead?
Food is a signifier of class, yes, but it’s also used as a scapegoat and a means of control and shame. You can eat this and can’t eat that, but if you do break those rules, then you can’t complain about struggling to pay rent or save up for a house. No, it’s definitely not the massive corporations and people behind them ripping you off; it’s all because you made the daring choice to need to eat to live.
Of course, there have always been periods of food insecurity, followed by times of relative security and abundance, and then, again, by insecurity. (But this has likely intensified post-Agricultural Revolution.) And it’s true that it’s the wealthiest in our world who usually had access to the best foods. (Not always the healthiest, though; case in point: Tudor monarchs’s obsession with sugar.)
However, the problem today isn’t that we don’t produce enough food. According to some estimates, the world produces enough food to feed 1.5 times the current population. This is also the most food we have ever had.
And yet, despite its abundance, close to a billion people worldwide face chronic food insecurity, including millions in the so-called ‘developed’ nations.
Meanwhile, millions of others struggle with something else: access to healthy and nutritious food.
Marie Antoinette, the last queen of France, never actually uttered the famous phrase everyone thinks she did — ‘qu’ils mangent de la brioche’, which translates to ‘let them eat cake’ — in response to being told that her starving peasant subjects had no bread.
But the decades leading up to The French Revolution — the last years of the Ancien Régime — did consist of increasingly extreme food shortages and high prices. This is what eventually pushed the French folk to storm the Bastille in 1789, and, well, the rest is history.
As someone who lived and studied in France for a while, I know that if there’s one thing you definitely shouldn’t underestimate about the French, it is how much they love white bread. Well, that and raging against the establishment.
Some of us are starting to feel that rage, too.
The rich eat gold. The poor eat mould. And cereal.
And yet we’re supposed to be fine with it all, with the increasing prices of everything from bread and milk to eggs and meat, with the unaffordable housing and with having to take on one side hustle after another just to be able to somehow (barely) stay afloat in this capitalist ocean. But hey — we’re all in this together, we’re told.
The food tells a starkly different story, though.
First and foremost, it’s a story of deregulation and corporate greed, which resulted in food companies being able to up their prices using inflation as cover and then rake in record-high profits. But it’s also a story of rising inequalities in the system that only allows the rich to eat and be healthy.
Needless to say, being healthy shouldn’t be a privilege; health is a fundamental human right. And people shouldn’t have to choose between their health or their wallets. Or between buying groceries and being able to maybe, just maybe, buy a house one day.
But there’s something else our food is trying to tell us: to get angry.
The French Revolution type of angry.
In a way, I do feel like I went back in time.
And that I should probably consider moving somewhere where I can get myself a couple of chickens and grow a vegetable garden because the situation here just won’t get better anytime soon.
How many people will be able to do the same thing, though? How many will have to keep making choices between feeding themselves or their children or being able to keep a roof over their heads? How much more will the profit and power-hungry companies be able to get away with? And for how much longer?
Sure, we can all try to make better decisions and save up whenever possible, but there is only so much we can do as individuals.
Well, let’s just hope that, as the phrase attributed to French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau goes:
When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich.
Thank you for highlighting this issue within the cost of living crisis. Just today I noticed that even supermarkets' own brand cereal has become expensive (too many people are profiting in the food business).
The profiteering by corporations during Covid is a direct and almost inevitable consequence of the corporate structure that dominates business today. The workers are pressed by managers who are answerable to their executives who answer to their board of directors who are answerable to stock holders. Of course once you get to the stockholders the only thing that matters is profits that drive stock prices and dividends. By then the consideration is so far removed from the customer's welfare that is is barely considered if at all. Aiding this detachment is the appetite of corporate leaders to buy out, dismantle, acquire and absorb competitors that reduces price competition. Blackrock is one of the most aggressive in this practice. Big oil strung together its most profitable quarters between 2020 and 2023 with price gouging passed off as rising expenses due to Covid related supply chain and operating infation costs. Make America Great Again like the 1890's when Rockefeller, Carnegie, Fisk, Mellon, J.P. Morgan paid no taxes while children worked in textile mills.