The Riddle of Is Cereal Real Food?

And the final outdoor LIVE Kitchen Shrink this season, on October 5 at CREATE gallery in Catskill, New York.

Dear Tamar:

We don’t buy snack foods, mass-produced breads, “shortcut” ingredients, or most other Standard American Diet staples, leaning to whole ingredients and farmer’s market vegetables. (You can guess we don’t have kids!) I KNOW how to make bread, preserves, crackers, condiments, granola, snacks, etc., so it feels like lighting money on fire to buy these things. My dilemma is: I work from home, and when I’ve been in meetings all morning or crashing on a project for hours, I’m ravenous—and only having INGREDIENTS and not FOOD means I eat half the box of Emergency Ritz so I don’t pass out whilst trying to figure out how to assemble a meal in my 30 free minutes. How do I live the slow lifestyle I believe in when I’m trapped in capitalism?

-Is Cereal Real Food

Dear Is Cereal,

I learned about nouns of assemblage—AKA collective nouns or terms of venery—as an editor at Harper’s Magazine. A fellow editor, who had memorized a dozen or so, recited them for me. I was awestruck. I’d spent twenty-some years without knowing that the correct word for a group of owls was “parliament,” for starlings “murmuration,” or for nuns “superfluity.” That there were groups who gather in “convocations” (eagles) or “shrewdnesses” (apes) or “galaxies” (women!)

Since that glorious discovery two decades ago, I’ve found nouns of assemblage everywhere I look—words that seem, to my mind, to settle naturally upon their groupings like bedsheets flung over a bed, taking the form of what’s underneath. They don’t always make “sense.” But neither do the originals, at least not sense in a purely literal way. The one that popped into my head when I read your letter was a “principle” of parsimony.

Of course, the “principle of parsimony” is already in use, more commonly referred to as Occam’s Razor, or the idea that the simplest explanation is the most likely one. The term doesn’t really refer to a gathering of “parsimonies.” But the principle of parsimony/Ockham’s old chestnut occurred to me when I read your question. (And, to be fair, a “principle” might be the biggest group in which parsimony stoops to gather—a tight-knit frugality of one.)

As is the fortunate case in some of the most focused, scientific inquiry, the answer here is not the most complicated, but the simplest. Ockham’s exact words were “pluralitas not est ponenda sine necessitate.” In modern English and for this question, a more relevant response is not an explanation of any phenomenon, but a simple solution: Popcorn.

Popcorn is the answer to your metaphysical question about following principles while trapped in a life that contradicts them. The alliteration of “principle, parsimony, popcorn” can’t be a coincidence. Though the following is obvious, our current deliberation moves me to celebrate the obvious: Corn kernels are whole grains. Popcorn is mostly-dried kernels, heated past boiling, until they explode. Accessorizing them, with butter or salt or nutritional yeast or furikake, or all of the above, is entirely optional.

You can buy popped popcorn. But you can also make it yourself with nothing other than kernels from whatever stand sells them at your farmers’ market, or these and a covered pot, or this hand-cranked popper, which I use. Popping popcorn is fast, whether it’s done in the microwave, an air popper, or on the stove. The result is an inveterate snack food that’s almost instant, but also can’t be made any more slowly—it is essentially fast and easy, rather than corrupted to be that way via compromise.

Dear cook, the simplest answer is the best. Make popcorn early and often. It should stave off the Ritz-emergencies—at least most of the time. Once you’ve eaten enough that your stomach has stopped growling and the world seems less bleak, remember simple dinners that, like popcorn, are fast by nature rather than compromise. Like frittatas, and pasta with chickpeas, and my house meal, and fried rice, and big toasts, and salads, and dozens of others. Cereal may well be a real meal, some of the time, and at other times, other real meals will offer themselves if you let the answer be simple and evident.

And stop by my Kitchen Shrink booth for in-person advice this coming Saturday at the CREATE gallery, in Catskill, NY, from 2-4 pm.