What Happened to Muesli?

 I don’t normally eat muesli for every breakfast, but I like a change, and I thought I would get some. 

There are things that are so emblematic of the capitalist system that we live in that it is even quite comforting, in a way. 

For a Saturday, the shop seemed strangely empty, maybe it was the inflation. Anyway, every brand of muesli (or ‘muesli), of about six or seven, including even Jordans, had chocolate chips in them, and all of them were some abomination called (here in France) ‘croustillant’, which apparently means they wrap blobs of oat flakes in caramelized sugar, so they end up like little flapjacks I guess. I quite like flapjacks, but If I want one, I will get one, or make one, given I have never seen one for sale in France.

- Now, I do not like sugary things, and do not eat chocolate all that much and do not want it in my breakfast cereal, but there seemed to be no choice. I went for the only one that had no chocolate in it, it was a ‘bio’ product and looked sober. I did not read the packet that closely and was, the next morning, disappointed to find it was also ‘croustillant’. It also had very few nuts or seeds in it than these gummed up oats and was much too sweet for me. The nuts that were in it were like concrete. If I had gone to the smaller ‘bio’ supermarket I think I could have got some actual ordinary muesli out of the VRAC (the hopper things), but that was out of the way and a bit of a pain, and the staff were often snobby, and your bank balance much worse off afterwards if you ever wandered off-piste.

So, yes, it is sort of comforting, I’m in this familiar setting, just that, I suppose, inflation has just affected things in a slightly more extreme capitalist way, - even humble muesli. I cannot be bothered to work out why. Someone please tell me. Perhaps they can save on the dried fruit and nuts and seeds and just use cheap oats, maybe they get the sugar cheap, and the chocolate, and maybe because the sugariness is kind of addictive they can sell more of it, obviously they are all copying each other in the competition, which is supposed to produce democratic variety but does not. It is probably a form of shrinkflation but instead of shrinking the size they shrink the quality. It can’t be great for your teeth, for kids especially, and isn’t it fattening? One reason I started eating muesli was for its extolled health benefits, a source of fibre, and I like nuts and seeds, and you used to be able to get no added sugar. The original brand was Alpen, which was very good, but I can’t find this in France. Jordans used to be a second choice. But all this health emphasis is evidently out the window now.

If I complained I know what they will say, “it’s the market, people want it”.

The Plant Based Alternative and Modern Puritanism

Almost all food for humans is ulmtimately based in plants, even if we eat meat. For instance, the meat we eat is usually produced by a creature that eats plants, like the cow eats grass. We cannot avoid the fact that as part of the food chain we as living things die and get eaten, somewhere along the line. Evolution even relies on this. It is a circulating spiral.

One of the big problems with, say, the vegan alternative to meat eating is the illusion that you are virtuous and avoid harming animals. The growing of vegetable crops in the current way is a massive cause of loss of biodiversity, so kills creatures. Modern farming, not just for meat products like cattle, but also for crops, change the landscape on an enormous scale and make it an inhospitable environment for countless animals and insects, and this includes of course the use of pesticides.

And no, we cannot suddenly change all this to nice organic smallholdings that do no harm, or masses of people will starve. Modern farming might be bad in the way it has ended up, but it has been able to feed billions of people, and this must be acknowledged.

Still, one of the ways our bourgeois class tries to market new versions of its commodities to us is by extolling how it is more virtuous, so that the customer can get a warm glow of satisfaction that not only is she or he a part of the wealthy who can afford such things, but also at the forefront of ethicality, a ‘good person’. So, you are also buying this image.

With electric cars, for instance, this has recently turned sour: not only because of the antics of Elon Musk in support of fascistic Trump, but we have found (from scientific research by the University of Aukland, Australia) that the production of electric cars has made more harmful emissions in those countries that have championed electric car technology the most. This is partly because of the manufacturing process of these vehicles, which leads to more emissions, but also the lifetimes of the vehicles, which rarely get to ‘pay back’ what they owe in these emissions. And, of course, unless they fully run on renewables, they also use fossil fuel generated electricity.

The marketing, in the media, of vegetarianism and veganism often seems like a version of political correctness, something mainly for liberals. This is not the fault of vegans or vegetarians of course. It is a problem with the market, mass production, and capitalism. Do we really still need to say it? That the way that farming is performed as a massive agribusiness, for profit, whether for meat or crops, is the problem, and you cannot change this by simply altering your diet as an individual.

But even if you suppose that this puritanism might make some difference, on the other hand it stands as a kind of moral signpost that the problem is people, individuals and their choices, their behaviour, what they want to purchase as consumers, and it ignores and let's off the hook the industry. It is a way of accepting the blame and the guilt not just for yourself, the person who takes this position, but for every ordinary person, it says you are guilty, not capitalism. 

But we are not guilty. We simply need to eat, sleep, and get to work so we can be exploited by this same market. We are like the animals and vegetables being farmed.