I have not forgotten C.W. Post. I never knew him but it was on his university campus where I first experienced alienation.
I was not a student there. C.W. Post University stood on Long Island, New York, and was the reception point for us hundreds of eighteen year old exchange students from countries around the globe arriving on the shores of America for a year’s stay with an unknown American family who would become our parents and their children our siblings. We would spend a year in local high schools spread across the towns and cities of the USA, where we would be like ambassadors of the country we came from, learning about America, disabusing Americans of ideas that all Africans were black (that the South Africans were almost all white was, of course, something we did not expand on too much) or that lions roamed our roads.
From the above it might be thought that the alienation I felt was the onset of homesickness, the realisation that, for an entire year, 15,000 kilometres of ocean would stretch between my family and me. This was the early ‘70s, the days before the internet and mobile phones: the most one might hope for was a long-distance call at Christmas, now six months away. But homesickness was not the problem: seven years of boarding-school, followed immediately by six months of National Defence Force training far distant from my home had made me impervious to homesickness. What I was experiencing was culture shock – the taste and smell of America.
The campus canteen was the trigger. At first sight, so different from the hard benches of boarding school or the tin surfaces of the army mess, the colourful array of stations where one picked up plastic crockery and cutlery, then moved to the machines which dispensed a choice of sandwiches, buns, cookies, chips and drinks was unbelievable. That communal eating could allow personal choice and not what was ladled, slopped or thrust on the plate in your hands seemed impossible. That we also did not have to pay for our preferences in convenience food was all the more inviting and the excitement grew. On our trays we carried piles of cellophane snacks, plastic containers and cardboarded juices. Finding a seat, I prepared to enjoy my first taste of America.
The taste of the synthetic. I did not know it then, but that was what it was. It set an indelible marker on my senses, a cloyingly sweet smell and taste that seemed clean and bright but screamed plasticity to tongue and stomach. The nausea that rose within me was not induced by the jet lag of our trans-oceanic flight: suddenly I felt alone, separate from everything and everyone in this canteen. I stood up, left the table and walked from the canteen out into the cool of the campus evening. I continued walking until I found myself on a ridge above the main area of the grounds. I looked out. I saw nothing. So different was this shock of the new that it wiped out my frames of reference: nothing from my past could fill the space which had opened before me. I was a stranger in a strange land.
That I lost the capacity and will to compare past with present did, in fact, turn out to be a blessing. When, on the following day, I met a couple of strangers and said, “Hello, Mom. Hi, Dad,” the slate had been wiped clean: my mind and feelings were ready to take on whatever and whoever they were and accept it wholly as what it was. I spent a most happy year with them and their two children.
But C.W. Post was not finished with me yet: it had one further lesson about change. Like most children around me, I had grown up with the idea that cereals were what one found in a box, not something which could be referred to as a crop. This was thanks to Mr Kellogg whose thin-baked doughs from harvested corn or wheat had cardboarded their way on to most breakfast tables where they made loud claims which their consumers were either too asleep or rushed to read. That they could be eaten without effort or delay before going on one’s sugary way made the Kellogg’s label synonymous with breakfast.
At university some years later, I, like most students, began to look behind the labels. There I read of an experiment where rats, fed the cardboard packaging of Kellogg’s boxes were found to be healthier than those which had eaten their contents. It did not surprise me. What did, though, was that I had breakfasted in the company of the Seventh Day Adventists and the Quakers. The latter had had their name added to the oats so that their qualities of honesty and integrity would be associated with the product. The vegetarian diet of the former group, with its use of cereals, had been the route which led W.H. Kellogg on his pioneering way to baked cereals. In the clinics where his cereals were administered to patients, a certain C.W. Post had been treated; subsequently he had gone on to found his own cereal company and products: Post Toasties and Post Grape Nuts were those I knew.
Grape Nuts! What had happened to Grape Nuts? Though I had parted company with cereals some years before, it had been the only box on the table with any substance. Dwarfed by the bulk of the Kellogg’s boxes, its dense granules packed down like a rugby scrum when milk was added. Whereas Kellogg’s products floated in, flaked apart or coloured any added milk, Grape Nuts absorbed it and gained a nuggety crunch with the taste of nut. They stayed in the mouth longer, not only because you wanted them there but also because they demanded to be chewed properly and not swilled away like the ephemeral cereals of the big box variety.
Aside from the fact that the name did not suit the product, the size and plain appearance of its box led to its disappearance from breakfast tables. Faced with the array of cereals which breakfast could display, picking the modest box of Grape Nuts went against the bigger is better mentality. How could such a small box satisfy a stomach? And at that price! The consumers’ verdict was that the cereal towers were the way to go and sales of Grape Nuts declined as fast as the rand, making it all the more expensive as it was not produced locally.
The innocence of childhood breakfast sees a world which snaps, crackles and pops. It certainly does not understand that anything from the line-up of breakfast could possibly be lost forever. By the time I discovered that C.W. Post’s Grape Nuts were no longer with us, I had learnt that products come and go. That I would no longer see that small box of dynamite was not the shock of alienation which C.W. Post University had birthed in me, but it showed me that there are some things, the loss of which takes a quality from the world and puts nothing in its place. What worries me is that I do not even notice it.
