Five arguments for the elimination of breakfast cereals

Why is our breakfast so boring, the answer once again is domination by corporations who force the next best thing to cardboard into our bowls.

90% of households in Britain and Ireland buy commercial breakfast cereals


Breakfast cereal manufactures are currently fighting a battle to stop the Uk government labelling many of their products as a damaging to children on the grounds of high sugar, salt and fat content.

Felicity Lawrencehas a great article on Kellogs fight to resist food labelling in the Guardian and a second piece on the origins of commercial breakfast cereals.

She notes
The British and Irish are the biggest eaters of puffed, flaked, flavoured, shaped, sugared, salted and extruded cereals in the world. We munch an average 6.7kg of the dehydrated stuff a person a year in the UK, and 8.4kg each in Ireland, according to figures from Datamonitor. The UK's breakfast habit is the child of advertising. The market for the cereal boxes which find their way into more than 90% of households here, worth £1.27bn in 2005, has been created and maintained by advertising characterised by health claims since the early 20th century.

Breakfast has an ethical dimension and an ecological one. Eggs and bacon can be equated with factory farming, although free range is becoming the norm, coffee and tea see farms across the world receiving only a fraction with most of the revenue going to multinationals. There is an environmental dimension to ethics and we have to think about health costs.


The key ethical issue over breakfast must be choice and freedom. The Ayn Ran school of libertarian freemarketeers holds that socialism equals Stalinism but what could be more Stalininist than the shaping of our preferences so that we eat dehydrated maize and wheat products. Stephen Lukes in his four faces of power analysis argues that most dangerous and insidious power is the power to shape preferences, so that we don't even belief that alternatives exist. Breakfast in Britain for most of us is like this, we forget that breakfast doesn't have to involve dehydrated cereal products, we forget that we can put something else in our bowl.

Incidentally the film The Road to Wellville and Felicity's second article show how the cereals were produced by do gooding quakers and health food fanatics, showing how good intentions can be turned into profit with nasty consequences.

I tend to eat a bit of porridge for breakfast,
a bit of waitrose or coop or corner shop organic porridge oats and if you want to put on sugar or golden syrup, its up to you! I sometimes soak it over night with some cinnamon or cardamons...nice.

fruit is good but you can eat what you want even cold curry...beware the corporations that shape breakfast, though!