Wild Animal Crunch

Well, well, well. It’s a cereal named Wild Animal Crunch, featuring giant photos of endangered species—such as a big, dewy-eyed panda bear—on the package. “Share your love for animals,” proclaims the cereal’s website.

So, does a percentage of sales go to save wild animals?

Either it’s none, or the cereal makers (Kellogg’s and its eager cosponsor, the Animal Planet network) are so modest they’ve chosen to conceal that information from consumers.

In fact, the relationship between Wild Animal Crunch and actual wild animals seems to be this:

1. Wild animals are on the box.

2. Wild animals appear on Animal Planet.

3. Animal Planet is on the box.

4. People who buy this cereal might watch wild animals on TV afterward. Particularly if they’ve solved the Word Forest puzzle on the back of the box. (Here’s a hint: Explore is written BACKWARD!)

The naturally (oh, whoops, and artificially) flavored vanilla-chocolate whole-grain cereal bits may very well be designed to look like animals of some sort, but the closest they get is looking like fetuses. Human fetuses.

And the flavor? Good Lord. It would make more sense to eat actual pandas for breakfast than to try to choke down a bowl of this stuff, which suffers from the “cut with real sawdust” flavor that typifies your local grocery store’s generic knockoff version of Froot Loops. There’s an unpleasant, lingering dryness that follows each bite, notwithstanding the milk, and “vanilla-chocolate,” as it turns out, isn’t much of a flavor choice. It’s halfway between watery chocolate milk and wheat bread.

If ever a cereal needed to be taken out behind the barn and put down, it’s Wild Animal Crunch.

Suggested Retail Price $2.99 for 11 oz box



Source: chow.com