Organic FMW

So I got around to tasting the Organic Frosted Miniwheats that Kellogg's is pumping and I thought I'd give a report.

The first thing I noticed is that the box is significantly slimmer than the regular box. It holds 15 oz as compared to FMW's 19 and 24.3 oz boxes and costs more than, I'm pretty sure, either box. I bought it on sale — two for $6 — and that is typical of the sale price of both the other sizes on and off during the year. So it is a bit of a rip-off.

Of course, organic consumers purchase these products for their virtuousness (perhaps the slim box is a tip-off to the marketing — thinness is a virtue in our gluttonous society, but it also is a great way to try and make money by putting less product in packaging) so there is a bit of an expectation that in buying something rare(ish) and virtuous you have to pay a premium. True, there are fewer organic wheat fields than conventional wheat fields, and it's easier to grow organic wheat once a year (winter, less weeds competing for resources) than twice. And organic yields aren't quite up to conventional — which means pumped full of petro-chemical fertilizers. But organic yields are, in many cases, 90 percent of conventional, so there's not exactly a shortage, shall we say.

I also read that organic fields use blood bone-type fertilizer, so if you don't like the idea of dead animals touching your organic, possibly veg mouth, well, you have a choice to make. Because when you think about it, there are dead dinosaurs in those conventional fields. On the other hand, there is no gelatin in the sugar coating; it's straight organic cane sugar. It's not corn syrup like you get in the regular FMW.

So organic sugar isn't too tough to grow. Sugar isn't one of those crops that is destroying the ecosystem (yet! Brazil, if sugar protections are eliminated in this country, might become a major ethanol producer, using cane sugar instead of corn like here in the U.S. There is significantly more energy in cane gasoline than corn gas, so it would be the most desirable product on the market. And it is likely that the world's (read the First World's) hunger for energy would encourage growers to destroy the tropical dry forest (read: not the rain forest, cane doesn't need a lot of water to grow so it's low-impact on irrigation, at least) to plant cane fields (this was a Friedman column I actually bothered to read the other week), but I don't think more organic FMW would be nearly as damaging as cane gas) but it's not corn, which takes up an inappropriate amount of resources to grow.

But it is taste where the organic FMW failed. They are like those Post knockoffs. Little, tough, dense, insusceptible to milk. Thier color, a darker brown, is unappetizing unless, I guess, you're a German health nut. The sugar melts off right away, don't expect there to be any FMW worthy of waiting to eat till the end of your breakfast (or dinner) with the last bit of strawberry because that nice crust of sugar coating still remains. I wonder if this aggressively healthy taste and texture is part of the plan, or if the nice people at Kelloggs really tried to make it so these were as identical as possible to their cousins (which I noticed after I finished the organic box looked awfully yellow, like a donut or something).

I'm probably going to continue to buy regular FMW since I feel they taste better and are more appropriate to my budget, which has an outsized FMW expenditure level anyway. Also, I don't like the food-elite bull that the slim, green-topped boxes create. I am not to be marketed to in such an obvious way. If I didn't already know that the packaging cost more than the cereal inside (for the regular stuff and probably, I'm assuming, the organic stuff) and that UDSA organic isn't necessarily the highest standard of all for organics (plus it is the distance the wheat is shipped that also makes up part of the healthy earth equation — how many petrocalories did it take to get it from the farm to the bowl? Was it more than the regular stuff? This is something I feel I ought to know) I might be persuaded. But I'm not.

Yet.