THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, June 13, 1996 TAG: 9606130505
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: 50 lines
For the first time in months, newspapers featured a business story Tuesday that could be comprehended by even a Georgian aborigine like me - namely the drop in prices on an array of breakfast cereals. That I could grasp. Child's play! Or so it appeared.
As if remorseful at having stooped to the lowest level of reader intelligence - namely Friddell's - newspapers also played that same day a story about a drop of a cent a gallon in gasoline prices.
Cereals - Froot Loops, or such - are not much beyond my ken, being a bit loopy myself helps get me in the mode; but I don't pretend to have the least notion of what goes into the rise and fall of gasoline prices other than high-octane greed.
That pricing can only be fathomed by a seer name of Lundberg who writes a Letter from an ice cave somewhere in the Swiss Alps.
My suspicion about gasoline prices is that if Congress cut the 4.3-cent gas tax, oil companies would muscle in to fill the gap.
What evidence is there for such diabolical maneuvering?
None, except one cannot equate the oil companies, when they get together - the Seven Sisters or whatever - to be as guileless as girls weaving a daisy chain.
But cereals? There was a commodity a child could grasp, until a closer look disclosed that none of my favorite cereals was on the list of those getting reductions of 18 percent to 28 percent but lagged in the range of 4 percent to 10 percent, if they were there at all.
Eight of the top nine were more candies than cereals - frosted this and that. The thought of facing, having just awakened, Cocoa Krispies in a bowl would make one's toes curl.
If any sugar is to be put upon cereal it should come from the human hand, not a machine that generally mixes in more sweet than one cares to eat.
Moreover, old favorites are missing from the list. Where are plain, unpretentious cornflakes, which go well with berries and bananas? And what has become of their counterpart, Post Toasties? And why have Frosted Mini-Wheats displaced forthright whole-wheat biscuits, prized for roughage?
Only a couple of new-fangled flavorful fruit mixes were listed among cereals reducing prices. Eating those delicious fruit baskets, one supposes they are wholesome, but for a puritan they also smack of being a dessert.
Long time ago, when dinosaurs roamed the land, there was a fine-cut flaky cereal called PEP, the first word I ever scrawled or printed scraggly in crayon beneath what would pass for my favorite wild animal even then, an elephant.
Now PEP is gone and no one but I recalls it. by CNB