Quipu

Cap’n Crunch Crunchberries

Overall Rating: 79

The cap’n seems to have mellowed a bit; a mouthful of these used to weld your teeth together better than any cyanoacrylate glue. Now it’s merely sickly-sweet. But hey, these are the ‘90s. [So they were -ed.]

Image from the Institute Collection

Appearance

A part of this evil breakfast. The crunchberries glare out of the bowl at you like so many pink, baleful rats’ eyes. Cap’n Crunch itself is a sickly yellow-gold pillow, bathed in enough sugar that you can see it. This is our idea of what a breakfast cereal should look like.

Texture and Taste, Dry

The “berries” are a brilliant addition to what was already a pretty psychosis-inducing cereal. These round, pink nuggets taste like cotton candy made from raspberry cordial, and each berry seems to contain an amount of sugar equivalent to a year’s harvest from one of the larger fields in Cuba. This product is the perfect size for picking up from bowl or bag, and the modifications to the original cereal that keep it from fusing your teeth together make it ideal for snacking. Or they would, were it not for the fact this stuff is so sweet it’s been proven to induce diabetes in lab rats simply by being stored in the same time zone.

Texture and Taste, With Milk

While not quite up to the standards of our youth, Cap’n Crunch is still a massively toothsome bowl o’ sweet, even with milk added. Not even the more-absorbent crunchberries can tone down this product’s superior snap. The overwhelming sweetness of the crunchberries is at first held in check―a little―by the milk. It quickly begins to reassert itself, however, and by the end of the first bowl your pulse should be racing. You won’t want more than one bowl.

Conclusion

This product is the Mount Everest of breakfast cereals. A fellow-sucrophile on the west coast had to give up writing cereal reviews after spontaneously developing 187 different allergies to all the artificial colours in this product. Actually, this stuff is fairly safe, since it contains its own limiting device. You’re prevented from overdosing by the sheer amount of sugar in this: if you manage to down more than one bowl, you have to have your stomach pumped. [March 1993]