The food is smaller and flavorless and annoying and I'm upset.
Last week, Alonso, who likes for me to share in the miserable information he finds online, sent me a link to WorseOnPurpose.com
It's an addictive and depressing site devoted to brutal facts about corporations that run the planet and how everything you buy is worse than it used to be, thanks to mergers and buyouts and private equity ransacking companies, all before leaving them in shreds.
It was, perhaps, inevitable that my breakfast would eventually be affected by these assholes. They have come for Weetabix.
Weetabix has been available in the United States for a long time, and it's never been an especially popular breakfast option here, but I'm devoted to it and have been for almost four decades. It's a UK thing. One semester-long visit to England in the late 1980s converted me to old-timey steamed "puddings" and black tea with milk and Weetabix. I also kinda-sorta came out while I was there, but Weetabix means more to me.
How to describe it if you've never eaten it, and it's thoroughly unsurprising to me if you've never eaten it... ok, it's like... well, it's wheat, and kind of shredded, but not like the Shredded Wheat cereal you might have had. It's fused, like wood shavings, into a little oval puck somewhere between three and four inches long, and the pucks come in a box with, depending on the size, one or two paper sleeves filled with them, with each puck on top of the other like a canister of Pringles chips.
On the Weetabix box I'm currently looking at while typing, there are two pucks that have executed a cannonball dive into a bowl of splashy milk, blueberries bouncing all over the place. If you look at the photo above that I took before eating, you'll see that Weetabix reality is more sedate.
Anyway, you pour on the milk and if you eat it immediately it's a very textured, crunchy, barley-malt-wheat-based experience, a flavor not exactly like Wheaties or Grape Nuts, but not not somewhat like Wheaties or Grape Nuts. If you wait for a bit, the milk turns it into a pleasing mush that suggests a hospital or nursing home. It's just a jump to the left of cooked rolled oats, Cream of Wheat, or milk toast, and M.F.K. Fisher herself loved milk toast so don't come at me about it. I have been an old man since I was a child.
We don't get Weetabix TV commercials over here, but we have had Weetabix media. In the movie We Live In Time, the one where Florence Pugh is the chef who dies and her husband is Andrew Garfield, she finds out early in the relationship that he works for Weetabix corporate and she lights up to learn that he gets all the free Weetabix he wants. This means that if she marries him she, too, gets free Weetabix.
On the very funny Rob Delaney and Sharon Horgan TV series Catastrophe, one character – maybe the sister played by Michaela Watkins, but I could be misremembering that – calls Weetabix "delicious slime."
If you are a North American Weetabix enjoyer, your box came from Canada until fairly recently. Sometime in 2025, they shut down production in that country and moved operations to Kenya – for an even worse bad time, just go to PostConsumerBrands.com to read all the racist comments about that situation. And by "go," I mean "don't."
Clearly, the move was made to cut costs and to exploit Kenyan labor. In the long run, though, it has also made the actual food worse. The pucks are somewhat smaller, they now come in plastic sleeves instead of paper, like before, and the formula and processing has changed, which has altered the flavor and consistency. The formerly highly-textured product, one that took its time to mush up in the bowl, is now a chunk of compressed sawdust that dissolves the moment it touches milk. The flavor had that little malt kick. Now it has the idea of malt. A nudge. Someone walked through the factory near the ingredients and said, "Malt," and then they were vaporized.
There's nothing to be done except observe and complain. It's too late to force the hand of Post Consumer Products. Some corporate board of deciders will kill the next thing, and then the next. Something you like that not enough other people like. No one eats whatever it is, anyway. It's done. It's over.
To enjoy my beloved nursing-home cereal, I can go to one of those British import food sites and spend a lot of money on a box from the UK, where, I am told, it remains unchanged, or I can just accept that the beautiful little wheat pucks have gone to live on a farm somewhere in Kenya. I will live with my flavor memories and take comfort in the knowledge that no one can ruin milk toast.
