Bowled over by bizarre breakfasts

By Sheryl-Lee Kerr

I'M told there's now a pet mega store chain in the United States,

Petsmart, which offers “share foods”'. The idea is that you and your pet

can sit down at, say, breakfast time and woof down your bowls of puffed rice cereal together in domesticated companionship.

If this seems a little unsettling, don't worry - your dog doesn't know it's eating human food.

Breakfast in America has been a weird enterprise long before this.

On a visit there at age 18, I noticed an odd, queasy feeling each day which, to my surprise, was not linked to Ronald Reagan. Turned out the highly fatty food was taking its toll. But plans to find a non-fat, unsugared brekkie proved a challenge.

One morning, I ever-hopefully ordered a “coconut pancake'', reasoning that with so plain a description, the turbocharged fats and sugars would surely be in the other, more exotic plates. To my horror, it turned out indistinguishable from a hot-pink frisbee. I nudged it with my fork, which instantly caked itself in a 2cm-deep sludge – comprising 70 per cent pinkened sugar and 30 per cent coconut.

I realised I had just ordered the world's biggest slab of coconut ice. Underneath which lay, or so rumour had it, a pancake.

I pondered recently whether American breakfast fare (a $US16 billion

industry) had changed much since those days. Some chums in America cheerily reassure me that brekkie sugar fixes are now even more thrilling. To prove this, they sent me an unscientific list of breakfast products so frightening that I'm loath to give them credibility by calling them food:

1. Trix, a children's cereal which looks, I am informed, akin to

“rainbow-coloured rabbit doody”. (Translation note: doody is what dogs find such fun sniffing under telephone poles. No, I don't mean the Telstra

repairman.)

2. Count Chocula and Frankenberry. Similar products entailing

“round crunchy balls of a mysterious substance with sugar on the outside

and different colours on the inside”.

3. Toaster Scrambles. These are egg, cheese and bacon in a

Poptart-like toastable sandwich.

4. Quisp. My tasters call them “sugar-coated, sugar-enhanced, sugar

pellets with corn”. Ah, I wonder what the chief ingredient is ...

5. Hidden Treasures. These consist of “stale, flat, corn pops which

may or may not have been injected with coloured, liquid sugar, which is

crystallised into a minute particle of sugar paste”. The box shows kids

eating spoonfuls of the delicacy while shots of sugar go jolting through

their bodies.

6. Reese's Puffs. Chocolate and peanut butter-flavoured corn puffs.

As one aficionado put it: “I almost went into a diabetic coma sniffing the

product inside the foil bag.” He says they're much better as party nibbles.

(What, so the guests go into comas instead?)

And scariest of them all?

7. Lucky Charms. These “multicoloured-shaped bits of marshmallow complement the frosted sugar bombs which look like puppy kibble”. Insulin, anyone?

I am left to wonder whether, when you take American breakfasts and

combine them with their gun laws, this explains an awful lot ...