Mystery in the Morning

I really like cereal in the morning. If I go out traveling and have fancy breakfasts in hotels, by the third day I'm missing my morning bowl. The cereal that I like best is Honey Nut Cheerios. Luckily we've been able to find it out here, but it hasn't been easy. Cereal is not very popular here and it seems to be targeted almost exclusively for children. Most of the supermarcados in the area carry only 7 or 8 brands and almost every cereal has chocolate added to it. But, if you are willing to travel 40 minutes to the nearest El Corte Ingles (a Macy's style department store which we discovered because it was the only place that carried the kid's school uniforms), on the bottom floor there is an extended supermarcado that has all sorts of extras you can't normally find like peanut butter and (joy) Cheerios con Tostados y Miel.

Now I'm coming to the mystery part. As I was enjoying my bowl of cereal, I started to read the side of the box. There it had the CDR (equivalent to USDA) guidelines along with how Cheerios stacked up. The first mystery was that the line for Calcio showed that the amount went down in the second column. In the US, the second column always contains the nutrients when milk is added, but that couldn't be right for Spain, because, even in Spain, adding milk doesn't lower the amount of Calcium. I was stumped because the second column did list “con leche” until I noticed that the second column also changed the amount of cereal measured. A small note said that the first column tested 100g of cereal, while the second column tested only 30g of cereal with milk. While that solved the first mystery, it raised another one (isn't it always the case). Why do they show a first column with 100g tested? A whole large box is only 375g. I eat a lot of cereal, but I'm sure I get way more than 4 bowls out of each box. This mystery I didn't find such an easy answer for. Maybe it is a marketing ploy to make it look like cereal is more nutritious, or maybe people just like dealing in quantities that can be made up using only 1s and 0s.

My wife thinks she knows the answer. She thinks that this is because Honey Nut Cheerios is marketed to Americans here. The Spanish stereotype is that Americans each huge quantities of everything and my wife thinks that the Spanish would think 100g is just about right for an American. After all, we've seen coffee being sold in small, medium, large and American size. That being said, I think my wife is wrong on this one. I'm just going to chalk this up to another one of those strange European things.