Kellogg's Blueberry Bran Crunch!

Much of our time and energy is spent adapting to this world. But there are the extremely rare instances when the world changes to meet our needs. And by our needs I mean mine. 

I don't like dried fruit. Perhaps the biggest attraction to fruit, for me, is its juiciness - this is why "fruit juice" is such a resilient commodity: it's the lifeblood of one of our greatest natural resources, to the point that we sometimes create fake versions of it with sugar and dye because we just can't get enough of it. So I can't help but look upon dried fruit as the soulless corpse of a once ripe and colorful miracle of Mother Earth, which is my incredibly longwinded way of saying that I don't like raisins, and that dislike has no doubt deprived me of many recipes that include raisins - up to and including (and maybe especially) Kellogg's Raisin Bran. 

I bring this article to you today in celebration of National Cereal Day (no I'm not making that up), but the news I bring will last far longer than this little-known holiday. There are very few things that prevent me from experimenting with breakfast cereals -- the biggest will continue to be the sorry excuse for "marshmallows" that have found their way into everything from Ralston's Ghostbusters mix to the General Mills Monster cereals; those chalky, chewy gelatin shapes have kept me on the sidelines for what could've been a lotta fun times. Life is pain. The other, of course, is raisins. I've tolerated a wrinkled cranberry and crushed banana chips here and there and treated them as the unfortunate addition that they are, but raisins are just too damn confrontational to ignore. And so I've had to ignore the ever-enduring Raisin Bran and its even-more-attractive sibling Raisin Bran Crunch - both boasting two whole-ass scoops of raisins served up by a voluptuous sun (who has fully transitioned into Pixar mode -- or Dreamworks Animation at least). One could say "Just get a box of regular bran flakes without any extra stuff in it", but anyone who asks that clearly doesn't understand and why are they even talking to me?

You know if you're fully conscious of what you search for on the internet and how much time you spend lingering on certain things you inevitably create your own algorithms. And it is because of this that I'll hold my nose and say "thank you, social media" for turning me onto what is, in fact, the topic of this post: Kellogg's Blueberry Bran Crunch!

Typically I'd relegate something as pedestrian as a new cereal to Instagram and be done, but when they reinvent the wheel like this it constitutes several paragraphs of buildup. And they rolled this out with very little fanfare; I'm not even sure how advertising works anymore but I definitely haven't spotted any billboards or heard any radio commercials. Point is, even in trying to find out more about it on the World Wide Web it seems to come across like "no big deal" - even to Kellogg's; those raisin scoopers seem to cast a pretty dark shadow over everything else. I don't even know if this is a Limited Time deal or not, but I'm hoping not because it's so good. Getting my hands on these was only partially due to the novelty of newness, but it was mostly because I'm down to do anything blueberry (I know, even dried blueberry). But the blueberries are encased in little blueberry-flavored clusters so the chewy-dried-fruit thing isn't even a factor; even the bran flakes are blessed with a kinda berry flavor, giving the whole experience a Blueberry Fruity Pebbles vibe - but better! I suppose you could even say they're better for you, but I'm not checking the nutrition facts; we can go ahead and say that Fruit and Fiber are my healthy reasons for scarfing this stuff and writing an entire essay about it. That + Happy National Cereal Day!

- Paul