Just about every weekday morning, shortly after my arrival here at the office, I eat some Weetabix cereal.
What? You don’t know what Weetabix is? [Here is a picture](http://home.uchicago.edu/~nmchang/Weetabix%204.jpg), then.
I know, it looks kind of like shredded wheat crossed with dried cow patty. In fact, I’d say just about every time a co-worker wanders past while I’m preparing my Weetabix, they smirkingly say something along those very lines. “That looks like a dried cow patty,” they say. Or, “What the hell is *that*? A dried cow patty?” Most of them have never tried Weetabix, and most swear they never will. It seems to be a point of pride with some people, like: “Say what thou wilt, but never shall a foodstuff so visually unappealing be granted passage through the glorious crimson gates of God’s own gift to faces, my lips.”
Well, naysayers, it just so happens Weetabix is among the more popular cereals in the English-speaking world. But don’t take millions of other people’s word for it: Here are *my* 10 rationales for pledging allegiance to these little wheatloafs.
1.) The name: “Weetabix.” It’s the double “e”s that make it the best. Why, it practically begins with the word “whee!”
2.) You can choose what texture you want your Weetabix to be. Pour your milk of choice on *top* of the Weeta-biscuits and it will soak right in — then you can mash them into oatmeal-esque porridge, or spoon off soggy chunks. Pour said milkstuff *around* the biscuits, however, and note how only the edges get damp, while the interior portion remains crispy! This is sensational.
3.) Fortified with vitamins!
4.) Organic!
5.) According to their [website](http://www.weetabix.co.uk/brands/weetabix/weetabix/), each serving of Weetabix contains 537 kilojoules of energy. I bet that’s enough to punch through a wall!
6.) Their website also once proclaimed: “Crammed with all the natural goodness of wholegrain, you can almost taste the long hot summers and gentle spring rain in every bite, resulting in the softest, plumpest grain imaginable.” Doesn’t that sentence just make you want to have sex? Maybe that’s why they erased [almost](http://www.dooyoo.co.uk/food/weetabix-organic/) all trace of it from the internet.
7.) Weetabix is headquartered in the UK and is in fact [“England’s favorite breakfast,”](http://www.weetabix.co.uk/about-us/) so [Jarvis Cocker](http://blog.joewigdahl.com/2009/03/17/jarvis-cocker-eats-chicago/) probably eats it.
8.) The yellow box also gives it a vaguely IKEA-esque Swedish flair that [brightens up your breakfast nook](http://www.losethattyre.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/144134029-9a36a85b141.jpg) and makes you feel cosmopolitan.
9.) Weetabix has an annual “wheat art” contest, [and here is last year’s winner](http://www.weetabix.co.uk/wheatart/images/thumbnails/5.jpg), by a Lincolnshire UK farmer who calls it “Manny The Mammoth And Family.”
10.) Dry, Weetabix actually kind of doesn’t taste like anything, unless you consider crumbling old newsprint as having a “taste.” Thus it is the tabula rasa of cereals. A blank chalkboard upon which to scrawl your own individual gastronomic logarithm. An empty journal yearning only to be filled with one’s florid personal poetry of milks, fruits and sugars. Whee!
(And no: Neither I, the DPD nor APM are on Weetabix’s payroll. I’m just tired of the abuse.)
Small Talk
