Old Man Breakfast

Start your day in 1955.

Not to get too George Carlin on you, but why is it when something smells bad it’s “smelly” but when something tastes good it’s “tasty”?

Smell is a sense, taste is a sense. But we make the descriptive version of one word signify bad and the other one good. Smelly got a raw deal!

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More and more I’ve been consuming Old Food. No, I don’t mean food that’s been sitting in the refrigerator for a week, though that does happen from time to time. I mean food that an old person eats in the 1950s. Here is the Old Man breakfast that I am going to make for myself right now.

Grape-Nuts: There are few things more satisfying in the morning than a bowl of cold gravel. Yes, there are ways to spruce this up. Sometimes I add berries, or sliced banana. Or sometimes I add the G.-N.s to yoghurt. Or sometimes I pour in a little milk, microwave it for 30 seconds until it becomes a porridge, then drizzle on some honey or maple syrup. But a lot of the time I just put it in a bowl with some milk and subject my teeth to some shock treatment.

Grape-Nuts (which, like Spider-Man, always includes a hyphen) dates back to 1897. (The boxes lingering on the shelf for the few weirdos who buy it are hopefully not that old.) As these things go, they are pretty good for you. According to the label you get 27% of your recommended daily allotment of fiber, and there are 6 grams of protein plus a boatload of Niacin and whatnot. There are 5 grams of sugar, which isn’t great, but it could be worse.

If you’ve wondered just what the hell Grape-Nuts actually are, they are basically tiny crumbs of whole wheat bread that have been baked and baked and baked again until they become tiny meteors. A “grape nut” is an old timey way of saying grape seeds, which, when you think about it, is what they kinda look like. This is abhorrent marketing, but tell it to C.W. Post!

V8: Some mornings there’s nothing better than shocking your system with a tomato-based sodium slurry. Even the lower salt version of V8, which I regularly buy, feels like an attack.

This delightful beverage dates back to 1933 and is a remnant from the “eat your steak, it has iron!” mentality of what’s good for you. The label claims it is loaded in vitamins, but who the heck actually knows. All eight of the vegetables have been frozen and dehydrated and processed into blocks of mush then re-liquified in a factory in Camden, New Jersey. I can’t imagine anything good for your body coming out of Camden.

Can you name all eight of the vegetables of V8? I can, because I am weirdly fixated on this drink, but don’t feel bad if you can’t. One of them is watercress, and who the hell ever remembers watercress? Another is lettuce. Mmmmmn, lettuce juice! Anyway, the full eight are tomato, carrot, beet, celery, spinach, parsley, lettuce, watercress. Save that info for when you need it. But it really just tastes like salt.

I oftentimes pour my V8 in a glass and mix in some horseradish, but not today. We’re all out.

Prunes: Some years ago you started seeing “dried plums” in stores. This was to hide the fact that they are prunes and when you hear the word prune you think about your great-grandma trying to take a shit.

Prunes are great, especially when they are wet and sticky. Two or three are enough, as I find them quite filling. I don’t understand why prune juice tastes different from plum juice. Would raisin juice taste different from grape juice? Why isn’t there raisin juice, for that matter.

Taster’s Choice: Everyone spending large sums of money on coffee needs their heads examined. Instant coffee is just as good and so cheap. I am particularly fond of Taster’s Choice from Nescafé in the glass jars. Those glass jars are nearly impossible to find in America, but there’s a kosher place near me that gets them imported from Israel believe it or not.

If you have the above breakfast while reading the morning paper while you’ve got AM radio going, congratulations, you have achieved Old Man perspicacity and are living a righteous life.