I’ve always prided myself on being both a cook and an eater who is willing to think differently, see dishes from different angles, and enjoy the beauty of things exactly as they are. For example, I grew up in Brooklyn and am pretty much an authority on what good pizza tastes like, and yet I regularly order from Domino’s, because I can appreciate Domino’s as “pizza-inspired junk food.” Another good example: breakfast for dinner. The thought of eating eggs in the morning or anytime during the day literally makes me nauseous, yet after 5 p.m., omelets become one of my favorite foods, and I make them for dinner at least twice a week. Why confine certain foods to certain times of the day? Why not slap omelets on dinner menus like it’s a normal thing? Why judge me for eating cake for breakfast when pancakes smothered in butter and syrup are completely acceptable? We should all feel free to upend polite culinary society as we see fit.
Earlier this week, I was forced to confront breakfast biases I didn’t know I had after watching this video from Mashable about a magical cup that allows you do drink cereal from a cup. Or maybe you eat it from a cup? I still haven’t figured out where the line exists with the CrunchCup, which has two separate chambers for cereal and milk, allowing you to essentially pour tiny fresh bowls of cereal straight into your mouth.
I’ve never considered cereal to be a mobile food, and I suppose none of this should really be weird—if we can drink soup from cups, we should be able to drink cereal, right? And yet here I am, completely convinced that this can’t be an enjoyable experience, and that the entire thing is far too weird for me. Cereal needs to be in a bowl, it needs to be eaten sitting down, and it should never be made directly in your mouth unless you’re extremely hungover and barely functional.
But I’m really not giving this gizmo a fair shake, am I? Who’s to say that we’ve been eating cereal the “right” way all this time? Maybe the CrunchCup is how we should have been consuming cereal all along? Breakfast is just a social construct that’s only been around for about a century and a half, which really isn’t all that long in the grand scheme of things. What other breakfast norms have we not been challenging here? Could science possibly develop a cup for on-the-go stew?