Lucky Charms

 I wrote an account of opening a cereal box – what is known, in the industry, as a billboard box – in 2022. Three years later, as the racist band of malcontents, led by Trump, Mr. Measles, and Mr. Bucket Shop, have decided to break America’s spirit and the world order, this account seems hopelessly nostalgic, a point to which we will only return in some phantasmal next stage of our neoliberal breakdown, our global shakes.

This is the account, a little edited by my grim future knowledge.

Breakfast cereal is an emblem of the industrialized food system. If the system had a totem, surely the faces of Captain Crunch, Tony the Tiger, and Snap, Crackle and Pop would be displayed on it. Or the Leprechaun on my son’s favorite cereal, Lucky Charms. Which, incidentally, you can’t find in Paris – or rather, you have to search for among those stores that sell American goods to the expat community, which have recently become fewer. The cereal box that lies open mouthed in our cupboard is precisely the Lucky Charms with a pitiful moraine of marshmellows and triangular shaped cereal bits at the bottom of it, less than a bowl of cereal. The picture on the front cover shows a Leprechaun with big eyes and a big smile, a green hat on his head and, of course, a green fourleafed shamrock stuck to the band, juggling a rainbow of marshmallow bits, which are helpfully color coded on the back of the box in English and Spanish. A veritable diversity initiative. The Leprechaun looks a bit crazier on the back cover, and his arms are stuck on him in a funny way at the side of the box, his mouth gaping in a smile that emphasizes his teeth, a uniform curve of white, no distinction between one and the other. Liena Tu Mundo De Magia, it says under him. The dietary information is printed on the side of the box – from which we learn that the cereal has “140 calories”. I imagine this refers to one serving or “cup”. In France, instead of Spanish, one often finds the printout of “ingredients” and ”nutritional facts” in English and Arabic. For instance, Honey Crisps are somewhat vaguely routed or controlled by the Kellogg’s office in Casablanca. Our Quaker Oats come to us via a Pepsi distributor hq-ed in France. And so on.

This box is a marvel as well as, given the ecological tragedy of agribusiness, a horror. Marvels and horrors are the familiars of my ordinary life – and no doubt yours, reader. We flip between them with every app and every birdless sky.

The world of commerce, the system of global production and circulation which brought that box to my kitchen (with a little help from my friend Tom, who actually brought it over from NYC) seems, sometimes, to fill the world. It depends, however, on the act of giving. I give the cereal to my boy. My friend gave his time and money to go out and get the box and put it in his bag and bring it to us across the Ocean.

Time and labor that are not registered in any Excel sheet. My definition of neoliberalism is that cultural regime which attempts to completely embed the social in the economic (defined narrowly as capitalism, a market based system of goods and services controlled by capital); however, it is always limited by the fact that it depends, fundamentally, on what Georges Bataille called the “general economy” – the economy of unexchanged energy, generosity, and giftgiving. The further neoliberalism digs into the general economy, the more it undermines itself. In this contradiction, myth is generated.

At least this is one way to locate myth. I cannot decoding a cereal box or an advertisement for cereal without falling, somewhat, under the spell of Roland Barthes mythologies, those essays on the quotidian that assemble various decodings of certain bourgeois patterns of recognition, or styles of representation, all themselves under the pulses of the mythic . Barthes wrote them in the fifties, when he was still using an impressionistic technique. He didn’t quite have together what he meant by myth. His latter essay on myth is confusing, I think, because he retrospectively tries to cast what he was doing in the armature of a more fully developed semiotics. Still, each of those essays has an exhilarating air, as though he were an alien among these ads, sports events, strip shows and automobiles.

Myself, I can sit pretty, given such predecessors as Barthes and a thousand others. Yet I still don’t have the categories to quite understand, for instance, the glue, or – I suspect – starch based adhesive that gives the box its use and mystery. The top of the cereal box is a familiar rectangle divided into two rough triangles traced out by impressed creases. One of the triangles slots under the other. However, to get to that organized state – which we will call the OPENED cereal box – I have to make it so – because the box is eminently closed this morning. It comes closed. It is closed when it finishes its transit of the assembly line. The box is lightly sealed because the contents of the box have to be protected from spills and damage. The cereal, in other words, is very much conditioned not just by the fact that its end use is to be digested, but also by its circulation – its storage, transportation, and distribution on top of shelves in a store. Due to the necessity imposed by the truck, the store manager, and the stock person, I am confronted by a sealed box top. A helpful site named “allpack china” provides a picture of the machine that does the box sealing, from which I quote:

“This is also known as a bag-in-box machine and it packs different pouches inside the box or cartons. This instrument is the first choice of manufacturer for boxed cereal packaging. It also packs cereals directly inside the boxes that are lined with plastic or paper liners. Top load and End load cartoners are used in cereal packaging.

Working Principle

First cardboard is placed in the bag magazine from where the grippers pick the cardboard, one piece at a time. Via gripper, it is transported to the folding and gluing area. At this station, the left and right edges of the carton are folded while the glue application applies adhesives at the bottom and sides of the carton to firmly close it. Then, this folded carton is covered with a liner, and cereal flakes are introduced inside the lined box. Finally, after a precise filling top seam is sealed using glue.”

I and millions of consumers am up against this machine at least one morning a week.

The potentially separable triangles that make up that box top are glued to two interior cardboard flaps. As an American bred and born in the 20th century, know just what to do: I must deflower this box top. But from long experience I also know that I can make a mess of it. Too much pressure and you tear the thing, destroying the ideal symmetry that would insert the slot snugly under the mouth of the other triangle. If I exert the right pressure, I can break the adhesive bond and the box top will tent perfectly over the contents, which are, as well, protected by being stored in a little wax paper embryo inside. That wax paper, too, I will have to force open – and for that, scissors is your best friend. That is, if they are at hand. Of course, scissors are all too often an afterthought, as I grip the two sides of the bag and pull on them to burst the seal. Comedy can ensue, has ensued, with too much pulling – cereal everywhere! The same elements conspire against me with the box top triangles, for my experience is that the sealant is a little too tight to make it easy to unseal, manually, these tabs. They will rip, and instead of tenting the contents, they will raise up, irregularly torn, revealing the grayish paper under the beautiful red die. Every time, then, I open the cabinet and take out the cereal box, its ruinous state will reproach me. This reproach will attach, like fine starch adhesive, to my thoughts about the cereal – I will be inclined to want to hurry up its consumption, and might well toss the box before it is completely void of honey smack pleasure, in the way one hides things one is ashamed of.

This is doubly bad, since not only will the box and the wax paper embryo eventually be tossed into the garbage can, from when they will go to further litter the earth and foul the water, but at the same time I will be wasting food, organic matter, which is even worse.

Thus, much depends on my successfully applying a degree of force: my shame, my eco-citizenship, and my sense of being a good housekeeper.

The need to seal and break a seal – that is, to have adhesives that both adhere and break apart proportionate to the human force brought upon them – is an old old story, going back to myths of seals of wax that lock away vital messages – as for instance in the case of Bellerophon, who was entrusted with a message that, under its seal, instructed the receiver to kill the messenger. That is one mythic facet – the other facet is that of the trap. The cereal box is, among other things, a trap – a devise that closes on an animal and allows the trapper to open it and capture the animal. Traps are part of a technology that goes far back in human pre-history, like fire and writing.

So much depends on that starch based adhesive.

My son opened the Lucky Charms about a week ago. He is already a breaker of seals, a bearer of messages. But living in France, he is not as utterly at home with this kind of box as I am, as I remember cabinets of cereal plenty when I was a kid with four brothers and sisters. Four cereals at least, one of which would almost always be Rice Krispies. A family favorite. Lucky Charms was always an eccentric cereal – one that, with those marshmallows, was not meant for everyday, everyweek, everymonth use. The kind of cereal that can become a favorite only as an unusual cake frosting – say strawberry – can become a favorite, in as much as it is the less frequent frosting or with Lucky Charms and Captain Crunch a less frequent cereal against the rice pops and cornflakes. This is the syntax of boxes that I have dealt with all my life.

Habit makes the habitus. The cereal box is a monument, among other things, to packaging waste. I know this. Yet it is also a nostalgia object, deeply embedded in my childhood and the childhoods of all the kids I knew, the ones who survived into adulthood, the ones who as parents, inevitably, took on the burden of feeding their kids in the morning. Our civilizing task.

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6Eleanor Courtemanche, Eduardo Gonzalez and 4 others