Posts Tagged ‘Cereal’
“I vant to eat your cereal!”*…
Gabe Fonseca arranges some of the 200 cereal boxes, which are affixed by magnets to sheet metal and on display in his Los Angeles apartment
At the end of a week during which stock market meltdowns and a spreading global pandemic have most of us feeling queasier than the thought of a “cheesy mashed potato or pot roast cereal,” we could all do with an emotional palate-cleanser, a Proustian experience that takes us back to a sweeter time, Herewith, the tale of cereal box collector Gabe Fonseca, who traveled all the way from Los Angeles to Minneapolis to visit the General Mills archives in search of his white whale, a box of Buñuelitos. But as becomes clear, when the object of one’s obsession – breakfast cereal – has origins as a dubious cure for masturbation, things are destined to get a little odd…
The world’s most obsessive breakfast-food fans demonstrate just how far humans will go for the sweet taste of nostalgia: “Lifelong Quests! Lawsuits! Feuds! A Super-Serious Story About Cereal.”
Via Read This Thing.
* Count Chocula
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As we heap on the sugar, we might spare a thought for Robert C. Baker; he died on this date in 2006. An inventor and professor at Cornell, he is credited with more than 40 poultry, turkey, and cold cut innovations, making him the “George Washington Carver of poultry.” Surely the best known of his creations is what he originally called “Cornell Chicken” (though he developed it while a graduate student at Penn State); we know it as the “chicken nugget.” He published it as unpatented academic work while at Cornell in the 1950; McDonald’s patented their formulation in 1979, threw the mighty weight of their marketing and retail machine behind it… and the rest is (greasy) history. For his contributions to the poultry sciences, Baker is a member of the American Poultry Hall of Fame.
“Design is neither an intellectual nor a material affair, but simply an integral part of the stuff of life, necessary for everyone in a civilized society”*…
Architect Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus in 1919 in Weimar by merging the state schools of fine and applied arts. In this pamphlet with a frontispiece by Lyonel Feininger, he called on artists to return to craft and to collaborate on architecture, and outlines the new school’s curriculum.
The Harvard Art Museums hold one of the first and largest collections relating to the Bauhaus, the 20th century’s most influential school of art and design. Active during the years of Germany’s Weimar Republic (1919–33), the Bauhaus aimed to unite artists, architects, and craftsmen in the utopian project of designing a new world. The school promoted experimental, hands-on production; realigned hierarchies between high and low, artist and worker, teacher and student; sharpened the human senses toward both physical materials and media environments; embraced new technologies in conjunction with industry; and imagined and enacted cosmopolitan forms of communal living. The legacies of the Bauhaus are visible today, extending well beyond modernist forms and into the ways we live, teach, and learn.
In its mere 14 years of existence, and across its three locations, three directors, and hundreds of students from around the world, the Bauhaus entertained diverse political and artistic positions, and served as hothouse for a variety of “isms,” from expressionism, Dadaism, and constructivism to various hybrids thereof…
Tour the collection at “The Bauhaus.”
* Walter Gropius
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As we grapple with Gropius, we might spare a thought for another kind of utopian– physician and health-food pioneer John Harvey Kellogg, who died on this date in 1943, aged 91. For 62 years before his death, Kellogg operated a sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan that was run along holistic lines: a vegetarian, he advocated low calorie diets and developed peanut butter, granola, and toasted cereals; he warned that smoking caused lung cancer decades before this link was studied; and he was an early advocate of exercise. For all that, he is surely best remembered, for having developed corn flakes (with his brother Will, who went on to sweeten and commercialize them).
Auld Lang Syne…
Rob Sheridan has a day job; he’s the creative director of Nine Inch Nails. But he moonlights as a photographer and artist pursuing his own interests… Recently they’ve run to what’s become of the mascots of well-known breakfast cereals:
… For some reason this image has been swimming around in my head for a few years now, and finally – after chipping away at it bit by bit over the last couple months – I’ve brought it to life as a large, absurdly detailed print. It’s kind of about the strange, uncomfortable feeling of reuniting with old friends only to find that the magic just isn’t there anymore – and in turn, about the melancholy “nothing will ever be as good as it used to be” type of nostalgia, of which I am increasingly fond. And of course, a tribute to the late, great, wood-paneled, shag-carpeted 1970’s rec room.
Thanks to Monster Cereal Blog, where this stunner was featured.
As we watch the chocolate bleed into the milk, we might send birthday balloons to Christopher Robin Milne– real-life model for the wise young friend of Winnie the Pooh– born to Daphne and A.A. Milne on this date in 1920.
A.A. Milne, Christopher Robin… and a bear
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