Life: Original and Cinnamon

Whoever decided to take a box of ordinary, brown, cardboardy-looking squares and call it Life sure had a lot of cajones. But hey, if Mikey likes it, it can't be all that bad, right?

Well, as you may or may not know, Life comes in two varieties, pasty, corrugated original (the cereal of choice for investment bankers, no doubt) and — for those who can't handle their Life straight up — cinnamon (clearly the preference of editors for online magazines and the unemployed.)

As far as general, sweeping statements about the relationship between real life and Life, well, the good folks at Quaker Oats don't present you with a lot of opportunity for cynical commentary. For one thing, the box's depiction of the cereal is not "enlarged to show texture." Nor does Life have many artificial ingredients, other than "BHT (a preservative)."

As for the taste, it's pretty great stuff. Vaguely crunchy (but not too) squares that don't contaminate the milk the way a lot of younger cereals do. It's sweet, but little kids raised on Alpha-Bits and Cookie Crisp would never say "Life is Sweet." Actually, the creation of Life and its ilk probably helped mark the downturn for cereal, the beginning of the battle to create "the sugary taste kids can't resist."

Nonetheless, it's pretty good stuff, and as the box says, "Life is really good, and you can eat it without milk."

— Eric Wittmershaus (ericw at flakmag dot com)