Raisins: The Saga Continues

As previously confessed, I enjoy raisins in the form of Glosette Raisins and Raisin Bran. The other day I was at the grocery store, and was looking for a delicious cereal that I could bring home and love. There before me stood Raisin Bran with its smiling little sun mascot in the corner. But if the sun mascot had seen the price taped to the shelf below him he would have been smiling no longer. For a miniature box it was like $5! I began to shake my head in disgust, but upon shaking my head slightly to the left I noticed a box sitting right next door to Raisin Bran. This box, much like the Raisin Bran box, was purple. It also featured a scoop of raisins. There was no smiling sun, but sometimes I hate the sun when it shines in my eye, so I could deal with this. The box also featured the phrase “raisin bran,” but instead of being preluded by the word “Kellogg’s,” this was called “Extra Raisin raisin bran.” There were many similarities, but there was also one important difference. This box only cost $2.99! I figured that if that cheap brand was significantly inferior to the quality brand they would be kind enough not to trick me by painting the box purple, photographing a scoop, and using similar phrasing. I put my trust in President’s Choice – after all, he IS the president and I should blindly follow – and brought the box of evil to the counter.

The box sat with its cereal friends on my shelf for a few days. Then, one day, I decided I needed a break from the Cheerios so I opened the Pandora’s Choice box. As I dumped the breakfast meal into my bowl I noted a problem. The ratio of raisins to bran was opposite to what it should be! One would think that the ideal raisin/bran ration would be one raisin to, say, eight bran. This was a two raisin to one bran ratio! Kellogg’s Raisin Bran’s entire image and sales pitch is based on the raisin/bran ratio, so it must be an important factor to most people. Though I do have somewhat of a problem with the “two scoops of raisins” catch phrase, because they don’t tell us how big the scoops are, so the information is somewhat meaningless. Also, there are different sized boxes of raisin bran, so that means they either use different sized scoops, bigger boxes have fewer raisins than smaller boxes, or they use more than two scoops for the bigger boxes, which would mean they are lying. Actually, it is probably all regulated by a machine, or mixed in a big tub ahead of time, so they probably don’t even use scoops. But the point is that they are competent and President’s Choice is not, and really one would presume that the cheap brand would be skimpy on the raisins because they weigh more than the bran and are thus probably more expensive. Anyway, so there before me sat a bowl of raisins with some random flakes. It looked like a bowl of dead flies with dandruff. I poured on the milk and began my feast. Except every spoonful I took had six raisins and one piece of cereal! And I really don’t like raisins – I only like them in Raisin Bran because they add a flavour to the bran. I wouldn’t pour some raisins into a bowl of milk and chomp in! And the bran has little flavour, so one flake makes no difference whatsoever! I ate about six bites and had no bran left. I dumped the remaining 42 raisins into the garbage. So I was still hungry. I decided to try again, so I began to pour. Once again, only raisins leapt out. Curious, I pulled the plastic bag out of the box. To my surprise and disgust, the top half of the bag was 90% raisins. But the bottom half of the bag had no raisins whatsoever! Just bran! There had clearly been no mixing involved at the factory. They dumped in the bran, and then dumped in the raisins without any sort of recipe, like the lazy people at Tim Hortons who force you to drink a shot of pure sugar at the bottom of your cup of tea! If the bran was on top, I might not blame the factory. I might just think that during the box’s journey to the store there was some shifting and the heavy ingredients plinko-ed to the bottom (although it would be an unprecedented case of shifting in the cereal world). Anyway, so this problem had to be fixed. I had to stick my arm into the bag and hand mix. And the lovely pouring spout that I had delicately ripped did not allow enough freedom for my arm, so I had to rip the top of the bag almost all the way open, which means next time the raisin bran is going to blast into my bowl overflowing onto the counter. After my mixing was through, I tried to place the bag back into the box, but instead of being a sleek rectangular shape, the cereal had all lumped to the bottom creating dimensions too wide for the box. So I had to tilt the bag and level the cereal out, slowly gliding it back into the box. I poured the better-but-still-too-raisiny-ratioed cereal into the bowl. I thought this would be it, and I would now be able to enjoy my delicacy. If this had been a poorly mixed and ratio-ed box of high quality cereal, enjoyment may have ensued, but now that I was no longer focused on the ratio it became clearer to me that the inferiorly mixed cereal was made up of inferior parts. Bran flakes suck, but these were the blandest bran flakes I’ve ever had. And despite the fact that the box was newly borne from the shelf, the flakes tasted staler than the Shreddies that have been in my grandparents’ cupboard since 1991. But this unpleasant taste was overshadowed by the army of raisins. I like to believe all raisins are inferior, but these were the most inferior raisins I have ever met. They tasted fake, like they were just lumps of sugar ground into a gel. They also clung together, so I would dip the spoon into the depths of the bowl and fish out a horrible raisin creature the size of ten raisins, but mashed into one horrid growth. I would then have to do a dash to the garbage can balancing the raisin ball on my spoon like in the egg race you play during frosh week. And some of the raisins were independently misshapen and unpleasantly coloured. It looked like a bunch of sick potato bugs had drowned in a cat dish of milk and become bloated over the weekend. And it appears the people at President’s Choice are aware of their raisins’ inferior state, because they have blasted the raisins with pounds of granulated sugar. But the sugar just soaks off in the milk so the milk just tastes sour and the raisin tastes as repulsive as it truly is. I was running out of time, so I just dumped the rest in the garbage. I don’t know what to do with the rest of the box. I don’t think I can eat it, I wouldn’t offer it to anyone I like, and I rummaged my arm though it so I wouldn’t even offer it to a homeless person who was eating sandwich remnants from a trash can. I would take it to the park and feed the pigeons, but I don’t think feeding birds raisins would be a pleasant idea. I don’t want to throw it in the garbage because I only ate one bowl and there might be someone out there who could really use it. Perhaps I’ll invent some sort of craft that requires gluing raisins to construction paper. Maybe there’s a theatre group who needs cereal as a prop. Or I could do a science experiment. In grade 11 my science teacher made us do an experiment with Cheerios. We had to make them swing on a rope by using static electricity. I thought it would be really funny if I ate my Cheerio off the string. It was pretty clever, until my teacher informed us he had used the same Cheerios throughout his entire teaching career. He taught my Mom. I felt sick later that day, but it might have just been the power of suggestion. I wasn’t very good at science.