David Spates "Therefore I Am" Published June 18, 2002

Corn Chex scores high on the
CRQ and you can dance to it

When in doubt, eat cereal. That's my motto in the kitchen. Breakfast, lunch and dinner -- any time is a great time for a delicious part of this nutritious breakfast.

Now that I'm temporarily displaced from the professional world, much of the grocery shopping falls on my shoulders. I don't mind. It's a relatively painless chore. There are times, however, when I neglect to keep our cupboards stocked with the culinary staples of everyday life. We've run out of baby formula, milk, bread, bananas, pasta, chicken, mustard, cheese and numerous other items during my tenure as chief procurement officer, but one thing we never run out of is cereal. Our cereal shelf is always very well stocked.

If the Spates house is dry of cereal, you know something has gone horribly awry. It's a great way to satisfy hunger with practically no effort, and there are plenty of times when "no effort" is exactly what I'm hungry for.

My default cereal selection is set to Corn Chex. When I've concluded that my dinner shall swim in milk, Corn Chex is where I begin the selection process.

I always have at least one box of Corn Chex on hand. If my last box of Corn Chex is nearly empty, I'm a little nervous, a little antsy. I start pacing the floors like Rain Man when it's two minutes 'til Wapner and there's no TV to be found.

What's so great about Corn Chex, you ask? First and foremost, the taste is simply wonderful. Nothing has the texture of Corn Chex. The "store-brand" knock-offs, while significantly cheaper, fall woefully short. There is no substitute. I consider General Mills' Corn Chex recipe as an important a trade secret as that of the Colonel's secret recipe or the Coca-Cola formula.

Second, Corn Chex excels because its crunch-retention quotient is quite high. The CRQ is a scale I devised years ago to gauge how long a cereal stays crunchy when submerged in milk. Corn Chex scores an 8 on the CRQ.

Combined with a 9.9 on the tasteometer, Corn Chex is a rough and ready competitor on the cereal shelf. The other cereals cower, knowing they're playing for second place.
Incidentally, Corn Chex scores a 9.9 on the tasteometer because that's as high a score as I'm willing to award. I operate on the presumption that there is no such thing, Bo Derek notwithstanding, as a perfect 10.

The CRQ, while important, is not the the be-all-end-all factor in determining a cereal's overall quality. For instance, Grape-Nuts has a 9.9 CRQ, but it fails to move the tasteometer's needle past the 2.0 mark.

Grape-Nuts, as far as I can tell, is the closest thing to eating gravel as you can get without actually chewing rocks. You could pour milk over a bowl of Grape-Nuts, put the bowl in the refrigerator, go away for a three-day weekend in the Catskills, come home, and then enjoy your cereal as you unpack.

On the other end of the spectrum are Rice Krispies, which do very well on the tasteometer, but turn in a terrible score on the CRQ. I eat Rice Krispies every once in a while because I like the taste so much, but it's a cereal with which I recommend taking the milk and spoon to the table. If you pour the milk in the kitchen, THEN put the milk back, THEN grab your favorite spoon, and THEN stroll to the table with your bowl, it's all over. You have a bowl of mush. To enjoy Rice Krispies, you have to eat them very quickly, maybe in front of the cereal cupboard. Too much travel time will severely lower Rice Krispies' CRQ. I've determined that every 10 seconds of delay lowers Rice Krispies' CRQ a full rating point.

Another favorite are the Frosted Mini-Wheats Original. Those are the bigger Mini-Wheats, as opposed to the dainty Frosted Mini-Wheats Bite Size, which taste the same but have been subjected to bothersome shrinkage. Mini-Wheats sustain a strong CRQ for the first five minutes, but after that they begin to break down. Of course, five minutes is plenty of time to scarf down a bowl of cereal, but if Mom calls, the cat escapes outside or the baby projectile vomits pineapple, you could find yourself in trouble.

My guilty pleasure of the cereal aisle is a box of Fruity Pebbles. Nutritionally, there are no redeeming qualities to Fruity Pebbles. It's a sugar fix, plain and simple, with a stifled suggestion of crisped rice. Brightly colored and stinking of processed candy, Fruity Pebbles remind me of simple childhood days when the greatest joy in life was tuning into Saturday morning cartoons while hunkering down with a bowl of empty calories masquerading as a "complete breakfast." Fruity Pebbles and The Justice League of America -- it doesn't get any better than that.

I'm constantly refining my cereal benchmarks in an effort to attain the perfect cereal suggestion for any situation, much like a veteran wine connoisseur can recommend the perfect bottle to complement any dish. If you'd like me to suggest a good dinner cereal or a suitable late-lunch cereal, just let me know. Or better yet, come on over. We'll share a bowl, but if you find a toy in the cereal box, it's mine.

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David Spates is a Knoxville resident and Crossville Chronicle contributor whose column is published each Tuesday. He can be reached at davespates@chartertn.net.