Why Cereal is a Salad.

Through the invention and progress of modern agriculture and industrialization, we have seen the abundance of grains and starchy vegetables farmed for the masses. These ubiquitous food stuffs make up almost everything that lines the colorful packaged rows of our supermarkets. Corn is fed to factory farm cows. Humans also love corn. Wheat makes up many types of cereals and carbs concoctions with cartoon characters and sometimes elegantly used fonts masking the food stuffs as healthy or organic. This diversity of homogenization has brought us such varietal compositions as Count Chocola, KIX, Raisin Bran, Frosted Flakes, Lucky and Charms and other sugary glyphosate ridden concoctions packed in colorful boxes designed to attract and manipulate your brain into buying. 

I enjoy a good bowl of cereal from time to time and the act of eating it brings me back to my childhood. How fun it is to pick out the marshmallows from lucky charms and eat them while letting them soak in the murky milk so you can drink it up later. When the cereal is finished, you have the delectable glucose/galactose cocktail to light up your taste buds and pleasure centers. Sometimes you just can't have one. You got for another bowl and fill your stomach with the starchy and gluten ridden chewed up mush. Don't worry, your cells will burn through that glucose fast you will be hungry later.

Lining the shelves are the mainstream cereals that have very little nutritional value, but there are also the semi nutritional ones with a few bucks attached to the price. They love to tell you how natural and organic they are. Less carbs. Less Sugar. More Fiber! In any case, you feel guilty for choosing the candy like cereals on a regular basis, so you reach for the healthier ones that may or may not strip the sense of childlike insulin spike you were looking for. It is the sacrifice for your health, but in the end it is worth it. 

So you can trade the less healthy cereals for the more healthy cereals. Great. Then you start getting into salads. You want to cut carbs and refined grains so you can maybe shed off that 10-15 pounds you put on for the holiday season. We get it. Go for it. Of course in this contemporary Standard American Diet (SAD) culture, a salad doesn't seem that appealing as a juicy hamburger or maybe a bucket of fried chicken. We know what we should do and our sugary addicted brains put on the breaks to prevent us from simply being excited about "eating a salad". There are so many ways to make and eat a salad. You can always buy the prepackaged semi wilted iceberg bags with the sad carrot shavings or you can buy the ingredients fresh from the produce sections and compose your own vegetable kingdom symphony of tastes. The choice is yours. 

To bring things in, how are salads like cereals? It seems like it is an odd claim to try to find the similarities in plant bowls and cereal bowls, but there may be more than meets the eye. Well, what makes a bowl of cereal. If you are doing it right, you have canonical cereal that consists of some type of grain base or corn base and the occasional dried fruit, nut, sugary marshmallow, chocolate square and/or healthy bran stick designed to influence the progression of a healthy bowel movement. Then the choice is yours for the milk. If you like the juice from the udder, then you can pour that on top of the cereal potpourri concoction. If regular old milk doesn't strike your fancy, you can choose the alternatives such as soy, almost, hemp, quinoa, rice, coconut and so on. The Health Food Industry has allowed the market to flourish with wonderful milk alternatives to soak your cereal in. What a time to be alive. 

If we go back, we can see that cereal comes from plants. Large monoculture crops made from wheat and or corn. This all comes from the ground, much like lettuce, peas and carrots. We tend to overlook that. We tend to forget that wheat and corn, which no doubt make up most of the things in the middle aisles of the supermarket, are indeed plants. Also, newsflash, coffee is also plant or at least a derivation from what was a plant. One of those things you can put in your health anecdote mind folder that you can pull out when sometimes feeling guilty for grabbing that 7th cup of Jo. Lettuce, corn and wheat are all part of the Agricultural Industrial Complex, from which we get such illusion of choice when choosing cereals and some salads. 

  " The Dressing" 

So what about the milk on the cereal? Doesn't that take it out of the salad category? Well actually, no. The milk could be considered the dressing of the cereal. There are many lactose based dressings that we reach for when eating our salads, aren't there? We have ranch, blue cheese, creamy feta, caesar, Green Goddess, Thousand Island and many more! Do yo see the correlation? Then we have the non-dairy alternatives such as oil and vinegar, vinaigrette, Balsamic vinaigrette, Newman's Own Poppyseed, and many more! The options seem endless. Do you see the parallel in the the variety of dressings and the variety of different milk like substances you put on your cereal. Dressing and Milk seem to almost serve a similar purpose although sometimes dressing is more about enhancing the flavors of the kale and cucumber. But in this case, try eating the cereal without the milk. Does it not lose its intended flavor? Doesn't the milk aim to enhance the flavor of the sugary and semi-fibrous cereal bits? The cereal needs the milk or milk alternative as much as the salad needs the dressing to bring about the flavors of the different vegetables. It is a marriage of Epicurean proportions. It is the like the balance of chaos and order and the yin and yang from Taoist teachings. Each compliments the other and when the ratios are off in milk or dressing, the whole plate or bowl seems compromised and in need for addition of more or less of something. 

So to recap, both cereals and salads have a plant base. Cereal may be more processed, but it still holds true to it's form and most of its remaining nutrition. Of course, lettuce and kale are less processed, but if you take the many years and agricultural experiments it took for it to take the form it is today, it is far from its natural make up. This also brings up the Beer and Bread similarities. Some call beer, "liquid bread". This is another topic of conversation, but at least the salad and cereal similarities both maintain solid forms and do not necessarily migrate to something more liquid. This is why a smoothie cannot necessarily be a salad even if you put all the ingredients into a blender. 

Cereals and salads seem to have the same procedural implications it takes to make such categorical contextualizations. This seems to sound a lot like the Hot Dog Sandwich Similarities that have been discussed before. Is a hot dog a sandwich? It seems like it fits all the procedural implications and contextualized categories, but it can be easily seen that a sandwich cannot be a hot dog since the inherent pillar of what makes a hot dog is indeed the hot dog itself and possibly the bun as well. This is much like the square and rectangle conundrum we have learned in grade school. A square can certainly be a rectangle, but a rectangle cannot be a square because of it's two different sizes. 

When can cereal not be a salad? 

A cereal cannot necessarily be a salad when it is stripped from its mainly plant based, but this also brings into the question of the extent to where the plant base category can extend. If you take out the grains from the cereal and leave the chocolate or even sugary marshmallow pieces, doesn't that still make it a plant base since the sugar comes from the sugar can plant and the chocolate comes from the Cocoa plant? This is a really interesting discussion that could even extend the categorical Salad/ Cereal paradoxical structure. In this case, I would be open to the possibility of extending the sugary pieces and chocolate pieces as part of the plant base even when divorced from the corn or grain bits. Talk amongst yourselves. 

In conclusion, it is important to see the parallels present in this cereal and salad discussion to make more informed decisions for your health. Sure, cereals can be more sugar laced, less healthy and lead to more insulin spikes and resistance, but you can also mess up a salad with a sugary dressing or the dreaded stale carb croutons that may or may not knock out one or a few of your fillings. I mean really, croutons seem to throw and wrench into the gears sometimes when eating a vibrant salad, but can also add some texture to break up the creamy decadence of the ranch dressing. Sugar content aside, we can truly appreciate how cereal and salad share a procedural driven contextualized categorization alignment that allow for more creative ways of how to construct and eat them both. 

DG