RIVER CITY JOURNAL: DON'T MESS AROUND WITH CORN FLAKES

Pushing a cart through the aisles of a grocery store is like taking a safari: You meet all sorts of new and strange creatures with such colorful plumage. Why is it people who are buying groceries dress so strangely? But the oddest part of a supermarket is what fills the shelves.

Because your wife makes a thoroughly detailed list, you don't pay that much attention to what you buy, except for the cereal aisle. Cereal has held a special fascination since your youth, when decoder rings and magic whistles were worth sending in a quarter and then walking a mile to the mailbox every day for weeks until that something special arrived.

For years you have had an odd relationship with cereal. Deep down you wanted to try a new and daring cereal, and goodness knows the cereal makers certainly knew how to get your attention in that department. So you would carefully -- and longingly -- look at the bright, new packages and read about their fruit-nut-fiber-sugar contents, and then put the standard box of corn flakes in the cart.

Creatures of habit -- you know who you are -- have a tough time breaking with good old dependable corn flakes. Let the health industry try to frighten you into purchasing stuff with oats or bran. In the end you always settle on corn flakes. That is because corn flakes are one of those familiar foods that taste pretty much the same today as they did when you were a child. There aren't many things left that taste that way.

But a week or so ago you were in the cereal aisle and something dreadful caught your eye. There was a box of corn flakes whose package proclaimed a new, improved TASTE.

Folks, you can fiddle with the picture on the package all you want. You can change the price daily. You can put prizes in or leave them out. But don't mess with the taste.

Changing how your trusty corn flakes taste is tantamount to learning your mother has found a way to use cilantro in her fried chicken. No, Mother. Cilantro is for modern cooks who eschew meat. Next you will find out your mother doesn't use lard either.

What if your sons, both of whom are excellent cooks in their own right, came home for their mother's beef roast and she said, "I've substituted sun-dried tomatoes for the carrots and potatoes. Won't that be special?" No, Mom. Sun-dried tomatoes are for Generation X cooks who never picked a red, warm, ripe tomato off the vine and ate it, hastily, like an apple.

Or what if your sons came home for your grilled pork chops (grilling on Christmas Eve is a family tradition) and you told them, "Nope, I don't use all those seasonings like I used to. I found this recipe for a glaze that uses honey, cayenne and pureed garbanzos. I know you'll like it." No, Pop. Your pork chops are supposed to taste, well, taste like they always did. You know. A little bit charred.

Face it. Familiar foods are intimate friends. When you mess around with time-tested favorites, you are pushing the envelope of acceptable social behavior. Corn flakes, the gastronomical foundation of red-blooded Americans, are not something marketing experts ought to tinker with.

By the way, here is a helpful tip for the rest of you corn flakes fans: If that stuff they put in the cereal to retain freshness is a problem, leave the box open for about a week. Then the corn flakes will taste just like you remember them.

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.