Dessert!.... for breakfast?

When I was little I was not allowed to eat sugary breakfast cereals. My mom didn't think they had any nutritional value so they were all banned from our house. My sister and I grew up eating Rice Krispies and Cheerios and Chex. No Lucky Charms or Fruity Pebbles or CoCo Puffs. I always thought I was missing out.

When I started college, the dining center had a cereal bar that offered about a dozen different cereals. So, like any other 18 year old fresh out of their parents' house, I seized the opportunity to thumb my nose at their rules and tried it.

One of the most disgusting things I've eaten in my life. And I've tried Vegemite.

As someone with a pretty big sweet tooth (I do not share desserts), you would think I would love them but I actually prefer savory breakfasts. Eggs are amazing.

I don't have children or nieces or nephews so this is a bit judgmental but I wonder about the parents that allow their kids to eat things like Cap'n Crunch and Honey Smacks. You can insist that the kids won't eat anything else all you want but they weren't the ones that brought it into the house.

Again, I don't have kids. Maybe when I do I will give in and buy just to shut them up. But somehow, I think this is one of the things that my mom did that I will enforce.

I turned out all right. Even with out the Froot Loops.

FOOD, inc.

I need to see this movie. NEED to see it. The director, Robert Kenner, is on Bonnie Hunt right now and I do not have the words right now to express how disgusted I am with the food industry.

My sophomore year of high school I read "Fast Food Nation" and wound up writing a research paper about it.

RANDOM FACT: according to Kenner, a burger doesn't contain parts of 100 cows. The meat and the filler (which is treated with ammonia to kill E. Coli and looks like wood pulp) each contain parts of 1,000 cows. Each. That is 2,000 cows. TWO THOUSAND COWS.

I've made a decision. I am going to work towards being a vegetarian again. I am going to do this gradually, starting with one day a week where I eat no meat and eventually going up to eating no meat. This will be hard. I love bacon, ham, chicken, steak.

I was a vegetarian for about a year in high school and, yes, it was hard. I stopped because I got mono and lost a ton of weight in the three months I was sick so I started eating meat again to put the weight back on. I just never went back to being a vegetarian.

The hardest part about being a vegetarian for me was that I am not a big fan of fruit. I like apples, clementines, watermelons and...... um.... bananas, sometimes....... pomegranates...... and that's it. I'm a vegetable girl. Bell peppers, onions, sweet potatoes, squash, cucumbers, spinach, pea pods, I love it all.

Except, of course, tomatoes. They can burn in hell for all I care.

Ground beef tastes weird.

I love beef. Steaks, specifically. But beef stew, roast beef, and roladen (no pickles, please.) are just as awesome.

Nothing compares to a good steak, though.

GROUND BEEF MIGHT JUST BE THE MOST DISGUSTING THING EVER.

This is how I think ground beef came into existence:

"Hey there, Bob. I got all these spare parts from that cow we slaughtered and it's not enough meat to do anything with it."

"Man, Roy, I got a couple carcasses from the other day laying around too. What should we do with em?"

"I gotta idea, Bob! Let's get an old potato ricer and smush all this old meat into something that looks like a sponge, grill it, put it on bread and in a couple hundred years, our great, great grandsons will sprinkle truffles on it and charge schmucks five thousand dollars for it."

"Sounds great, Roy!"

...And so the hamburger was born.

Clearly, this is a dramatization. But my hatred for burgers and ground beef is real.

RANDOM FACT: That burger I described is totally real. Hubert Keller makes it. I can think of so many other things I would rather spend $5000 dollars on.

RANDOM FACT: A single hamburger contains meat from up to 100 cows.

I lived in Europe when I was growing up and I remember mad cow disease being a very real issue. Maybe that's what I am disgusted by ground beef. But that doesn't explain why I think that it tastes like cinnamon.

Ew.

I miss George Carlin.