Why don’t health cereals contain toy surprises?

I’ve been thinking. Why don’t today’s cereals contain a toy surprise?

When I was a kid, my siblings and I would battle for those toy surprises. The rubber band or baking soda boats. The super-bouncy balls. The little coloring books. Life was good.

The battle would begin in the cereal aisle. Scanning the boxes for little promised treasures and begging our mother with frantic pointing for that one.

But we have a box of Sugar-Frosted Rainbow Leprechaun Rocks at home. What about Anthony Tiger Icing Shards? Those are Great!

Nope. I need that Leprechaun bad, mom. The box promises a slide puzzle.

Once home, mom stored the cereal boxes alphabetically in the cabinet dedicated to morning sugar poison. Then Mission Impossible would begin. Get to the toy prize before anyone else. Even if you didn’t want that particular item, possession could serve as an ideal bartering chip for anything from another cereal prize, the last cookie, or the undisturbed use of a treasured but shared item (like the boomerang).

I once held a flimsy plastic, malfunctioning gyroscope hostage for three weeks until my brother acquiesced to trade for his temporary tattoo stash.

So, Mission Impossible.

Have you met my mother? Between her Bionic Woman ears, capable of identifying the tearing of a candy wrapper six rooms away, her invisible, but highly attuned eyes in the back of her head, and her sharpshooter talent with a slipper, you did not mess with that woman. I still don’t. She’s scary.

She was, however, predictable and could be found in one of four places at any time. In order of likelihood and duration, they were:

1. The kitchen. If she wasn’t cleaning it, doing dishes, planning meals, or rearranging cabinets so it was all alphabetical, she was cooking. That woman cooked for at least six hours a day every day. She had to be cooking for the neighborhood because we’d get dinner and a dessert. Where was all that food going? You can, however, appreciate how problematic her habitual presence made the mission. We, the kids, were at school for eight hours and in bed for eight hours. The opportunity to execute was a crank-operated basement apartment window.
2. The living room. I consider the couch my mother’s perch. For another 70% of her day, she’d have one eye on her soap opera, one eye on the laundry she was folding, one eye on the pot boiling on the stove, one eye on each of the four of us, and one eye watching the clock so she could blurt every fifteen or so minutes: Where is your father? The wall dividing the kitchen from the living room, blocking a human’s line of sight, was no barrier for her. She had those ears and all those eyes. After we were dismissed to bed, one of us might have the hubris to sneak down the hall (on all fours attempting to avoid the sonic hearing like you would avoid smoke in an inferno) and into the kitchen to attempt the prize grab. But it was unwise to disturb her evening shows and her focus on the TV Guide crossword.
3. The laundry room. If she wasn’t in the living room or kitchen, we could find her in the laundry room. However, not only could she fold clothes but also she could fold space. No one in the history of laundry is able to put a load in the dryer and the next one in the washer, pre-treating as needed, in less than a minute. Except her. And one minute is not enough time for anything but a snatch mission. One of us, who shall remain nameless (me), tried to snatch a box from the cabinet and attempt the procedure in the bedroom. This was a major error resulting in punishment rivaling that for the federal sentencing of felony murder. How did she know, you ask? Bionic hearing and a box missing from the alphabetical order.
4. The bedroom. My mother never slept. She and my father would occasionally lock themselves in the bedroom to “do bills.” I’d like to believe, still, that that was the truth. Bills were done a few times each week, so the amount of time was so minimal, and so inconsistent, as to not be a window of opportunity. And honestly, during bills, I was charged with watching my three siblings. I’d spend the time asserting my role as the elder and deflecting them from the cereal mission so I could preserve my chance.
5. The bathroom. Contrary to popular belief, my mother did use the facilities. For bodily functions, the time warp was similar to the laundry moment — and she regularly kept the door ajar. Doing so permitted enhanced bionic hearing and eliminated any barrier to calling out directives and screaming threats. “Are you in that cereal cabinet? You know I can hear you. Do you want to spend your life in your room?”
6. But wait: She did take very long, hot showers to “wash away the day and have one moment’s peace from all of you.” Ah, those were a reliable 15 minutes. Plenty of time to get in, get a prize, get out.

THE MISSION

My husband pined that he enjoyed waiting for the moment he would pour the cereal and the toy would appear in his bowl. He did not have competitive siblings. His older brother was Farah Poster focused and his baby brother was not yet trained in cereal prize missions.

My siblings and I, however, were competitive.

To sneak-retrieve the prize before the cereal was consumed, one would widen the mouth of the cereal box and dig with grasping fingers into the contents. Fingertips would graze an object dissimilar to the crunchy food stuff and score!

Gold in them there hills!

If mom would catch any of us, that firm swipe across the back of the head was inevitable punishment for damaging the box, crushing the food contents, and flinging crumbs about. And “not having the self-control to wait until the cereal is done!”

But, if we weren’t the first ones, our dad would get it first. And he’d play with the treasured toy with a big I’m smarter than you smile across his face.

Those were good days.

PRIZE IDEAS

But I wasn’t thinking about that. I was wondering why healthy cereals don’t include a toy prize to entice kids to choose Butt Blow Oat Sticks instead of Frosty Crap Jacks. You don’t need a toy to get a kid to want Frosty Crap Jacks or Diabetic Coma Pop Lumps. But no kid, except for Moonbeam and Sunshine, who live with their parents in California in a yurt, no kid is choosing Shredded Wood Chips. Even if it includes Cranberry and Date Gravel.

You add that toy surprise, you’d have healthier kids. And happier teachers who did not have to deal with thirty tiny people suffering sugar psychosis for the first three hours of school every morning. I am sure the teacher’s unions would back this plan. Especially if 10% of the toys were educational so the teachers could point to the pedagogical goal and did not have to admit the true goal of calming down a generation of unable to focus humans.

But I guess your legal team has advised that you can’t add those prizes. Some Tide-Pod kid might swallow it.

But I had one last thought. Cereal companies, listen up! What if you included cryptocurrency in every box of Shredded Wood Chips? Sure, the American Medical Association would be against it since all that healthy eating would harm their profitability — but the toilet paper manufacturers might fund it. So would Elon Musk. Because he can.

Then you’d get me to dive into Molar Splitting Bran Rocks. And my kids would be ordered to eat a box a day. Every day.

But you’d better believe I’d get to the prize first.