The Longest Story About Cereal You Will Read Today, Guaranteed

When I was in England for a semester during my sophomore year in college, I was not the most adventurous grocery shopper. My roommates bought flavored yogurts and mysterious-looking pasties without trepidation, but I was not nearly as trusting of what I was confronted with at the grocery store. I found myself unable to see past the unappetizing appearance of watery cheeses or the bizarrely-named "cloudy lemonade."

Such is how I ended up living almost entirely on the BEST cereal ever, Kellogg's Crunchy Nut. I ate that cereal morning, noon, and night without abandon. I loved it, and was perfectly happy to sustain myself on honey-flavored flakes of cereal for the duration.

So you can imagine how distraught I was upon my return to the states to discover that my beloved Crunchy Nut was unheard of in my home country. I tried everything that even closely resembled that cereal, including Honey Bunches of Oats, which absolutely does NOT hold up, and is not even REMOTELY the same thing.

"Surely you can find something similar," fellow traveler and roommate Julie would say. "I wouldn't think it'd be THAT hard. It's just honey-flavored Corn Flakes!"

"False," I petulantly replied, then added wistfully, "A Crunchy Nut substitute does not exist for me in this land."

This is the part of the movie where the screen would darken, and then a line of white writing would appear, reading "7 Years Later."

From Wikipedia: "Crunchy Nut (previously known as Crunchy Nut Corn Flakes) is a breakfast cereal made by Kellogg's. They were first introduced to the UK and Ireland around 1980. The cereal is Kellogg's second most popular cereal in the UK after Special K. In 2011, Crunchy Nut was introduced to the US Market."

Oh yes, my friends. You read that right. CRUNCHY NUT CEREAL IS NOW AVAILABLE IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, LAND OF THE FREE AND HOME OF THE BRAVE AND NOW ALSO DELICIOUS.

Upon hearing that my favorite cereal could now supposedly be found at my local grocery store, I indeed stormed the aisles of my local food provider in search of the perfect breakfast food. And there, among the Fruity Pebbles and the Kashi Granola... it wasn't. No bright yellow box! No Kellogg's-labelled package proclaiming "NEW!"

Despair.

But then. (You didn't think I'd leave you without a happy ending, did you??) My not-so-local grocery store to the rescue! It's true: up the road a piece, in a grocery store I do not often frequent, sat boxes of exactly what I was looking for. I picked up a box of Crunchy Nut amidst memories of my Oxfordian semester and headed to the checkout counter.

Of course, the biggest question one would have at this point: Would it taste the same? Had I built it up in my memory to be better than it is in reality? Would the American import be less tasty than its British counterpoint?

Scene: A bowl, a spoon, skim milk, and my honey-covered friends. (The cereal, I mean. Not actual friends covered in honey, as hilarious as that would be.) The verdict? Even BETTER than I had remembered! I went through that box of cereal in less than a week, even taking the last bit of it to work to eat for lunch on Friday.

The lesson here is, obviously, that DREAMS REALLY CAN COME TRUE. No matter how big it is, even if your dream involves breakfast cereal, it can happen.

Dream big, kids. Dream big.