I wonder who came up with the idea of slicing up a banana and putting it on top of cereal. I learned to do it from my mom, but I of course realize that the idea of combining fruit, cereal, and milk is not uniquely original to her. I mean if you know my mother, you know that it is not completely out of the realm of possibility that she is in fact the innovator who created this tasty breakfast combo. However, the fact that strawberries can be seen floating happily in the bowl of Cheerios on the outside of each big yellow box of toasted o's would lead me to believe that other people in the world besides me and my mom enjoy fruit with their morning bowl of crunchy puffed grains and cold milk.
Let me just clarify that last statement lest I sound like an uncultured rube. Many of you probably already know that boxes of breakfast cereal play a much greater roll in the morning routine of Americans than they do in many other parts of the world. I was made painfully aware of this on my very first trip to France when I grew tired of a steady diet of warm, flaky breakfast croissants, smeared with fresh creamy butter and tangy cherry jam. To remedy breakfast boredom, I went in search of the comforts of home. Cereal and milk, fruit being optional due to budgetary contraints. I was shocked to discover that while the average aisle of cereal in an American supermarket could comfortably hold four Chevy Suburban SUV's parked end to end, you would be hard pressed to squeeze your entire bicycle within the confines of a French cereal aisle. Three lessons learned...1) No one in the world likes cereal quite as much as we do in America. 2) You cannot buy Honeycombs in Paris unless you offer to sell your first born child in exchange for a stale box from a tiny shop that specializes in importing American foods. 3) If you are ever offered Weetabix as a breakfast option, I advise you to politely decline. In my experience, it is actually llama food disguised in a breakfast cereal box. It is a cruel joke that Europeans like to play on poor unsuspecting cereal loving Americans.
Now that we have that urgent cultural tidbit out of the way, I can get back to the all important business of cereal and sliced bananas. You see, despite the fact that my own son uses the French word banane instead of saying banana, his preference for morning cereal is all American. Since his arrival two years ago, I have lovingly sliced no less than 597 bananas, not to mention countless pears, apples, plums, pineapples, and cantaloupes. As I speedily slice and dice through each piece of fruit, before passing it off to my little boy who is squawking like some kind of ravenous baby bird in the corner of my dining room, I think back to my own mom who did the same for me.
I clearly remember life prior to the development of fine motor skills. For a toddler, the seemingly simple task of slicing a banana with a butter knife took the same amount of effort as an adult trying to sew a button onto a shirt while wearing oven mitts on both hands. I remember being amazed at how quickly and neatly my mom could produce perfectly uniform circles of banana and plop them into my bowl in one smooth, swift motion. Her technique is the same one that I rely on today, but when I tried to recreate it as a kid, I ended up with a heap of smashed brown banana bits and a jauntily placed band-aid over my left eyebrow where I nearly poked my own eye out.
So each morning I would sit with an unpeeled banana next to a tot sized serving of crispies that I poured myself, seventy-five percent of which actually landed inside the bowl. The remaining twenty five percent littered the table, the chair, the floor, and various parts of my body. I would wait not so patiently until my mom was available to manage the daily ritual of banana slicing and milk pouring with impossible ease. I now understand what a staggering number of bananas she must have peeled and sliced in my lifetime alone, not to mention for little brothers, my other two siblings, nieces & nephews, random neighbor kids, and occasionally my dad.
I am sure that I have probably never officially thanked her for managing the overwhelming task of handling all household fruit preparation. The prospect is overwhelming especially when combined with all of the other monotonous daily tasks that she was in charge of sometimes when she was half asleep, sick as a dog, or simply sick and tired: Matching socks, making beds, replacing rolls of toilet paper, wiping up grubby hand prints, wiping snotty noses, tracking down lost library books, repeatedly kissing zillions of boo-boos, and cleaning up the remaining twenty five percent of crispies that never seemed to make it into the bowl.
This brings me back to my original question of who came up with combining sliced bananas and cereal? I have changed my mind completely. There is no way it was my mom or any other mom in her right mind that decided this would be a grand idea. In fact, I am considering filing a complaint with OSHA over these unfair working conditions and the unrelenting amount of fruit that I am required to peel and slice on a daily basis. If that doesn't work, I am going to develop my own advertising smear campaign against the combination of fruit and cereal. How do the French stay so slim? They don't eat fruit and cereal, that's how, at least that is the little lie I am going to tell in my house because if I have to slice one more stinking banana, I might lose my mind and I'm only two years in! P.S. Thanks, mom.
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