Froot Loops

Perkins isn't known as being a bastion of customer service and reliability. In fact, many Perkins restaurants can best be described as ongoing, 24-hour-a-day states of warfare between surly, miserable patrons and rightfully embittered waiters and waitresses, exhausted by interminable shifts spent doling out borderline edible food to ungrateful teens. (Please click here for our fun legal disclaimer.)

It was in this environment that this reviewer happened upon Froot Loops! after a ten-year period of Froot Loops! abstinence. After being informed that Perkins was out of "Special K" (this reviewer's favorite cereal choice) Fruit Loops! were ordered as a crazy, late-night alternative.

They haven't changed much, really. They are still crunchy, come in a rainbow of fun flavors, and taste sweet. They also transform the milk in one's bowl into FrootyMilk, a commodity of dubious worth.

Most importantly, though, Kellogg's now claims to have improved Fruit Loops! with the application of "fun colored confetti" to its small, garishly colored rings of sweetened grain. In addition to being grammatically incorrect, the fun, colored confetti is so modestly applied and styled as to have evaded detection throughout the consumption of an entire bowl of Froot Loops!, leaving this reviewer to doubt its effectiveness.

In fact, the most fun thing about finishing the bowl was coming to the realization that I'd spent $1.60 to eat less than an ounce of material that, at best, could be praised for changing the flavor of the tiny amount of milk that surrounded it.

Froot Loops! are no longer, as Henry Kissinger once famously stated, "the potential salvation of NATO and its international ambitions in a small, ring-shaped cereal format." They are, sadly, nothing more than fun colored.

— James Norton (jim@flakmag.com)