I love cereal. I always have. A day started, or sometimes ended, by a nice bowl of cereal – ice cold milk frosting up a bowl – always made things better. Except at some point I became mildly lactose intolerant. Mostly for raw milk.

I still enjoy a grilled cheese sometimes, or cheese on a burger. Milk in my coffee is good, but quiche isn’t (good in my coffee or for my stomach). A bowl of cereal with milk is right out. And some of you might suggest one of two solutions:

1) Lactaid, or the equivalent. I’ve tried it. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. I also have an ulcer. Now when you have a lactose issue and an ulcer it means that if lactose sets you off that will set off your ulcer. That is a fate unkind and painful. So for something that has never worked 100% I have to simply not trust it and keep moving.

2) Soy milk, fake milk, some fucked up percent of milk … no. I want milk or not. Cereal doesn’t taste right with non-milk.

So there I am. I love cereal but I can’t have it.

Well sure I can. Only dry. You quickly learn which cereals you can eat dry. Flakes are pretty much right out. Captain Crunch is, of course, an exercise in pain. You want bigger cereals, or things like Cheerios. Rice Krispies is mostly out if only due to the size.

Except, possibly, in the post-Auschwitz form of a Rice Krispie “treat.” I’m sorry but when you take someone and tell them “Here, hold this marshmallow” and then you put them bodily into an oven? I call German shenanigans. So the whole Rice Krispie “treat” thing is highly suspect to my way of thinking. But anyway I did like Rice Krispies once upon a time, they were just so small and annoying to eat dry.

Today in the market I saw a box. It said “JUMBO Rice Krispies” on it. I suppose the Krispie Mengele had worked genetic magic on them and grew them to abnormal size. But I simply had to buy some. I rushed home, tore open the box and almost got a floor full of cereal. Woops.

Regardless!

These things claim to be three times the size of a normal adult Krispie. I wondered how this would affect them. I mean the tiny little exploding Pop Rocks of the cereal world were just right for what they were.

These are closer to the Sugar Pop family in size and shape. And, oddly enough, taste. They’re like non-overly-sugar-coated Sugar Pops. Sort of … cake-y in taste, even. Strange shit, I tell you! They have a weight, a mass to them … a presence… if you will.

I’m not sold on them, frankly. But it had to be tried.

I wonder what German cereal experiments will yield next.