Lucky Charms was once among my favorite food items ever. Was.
There is a specific process for eating Lucky Charms. First, you pour the cereal into the bowl. Easy enough. Secondly, you pour the milk on top. You cannot pre-fill your bowl with milk for Lucky Charms, as the cereal needs a nice coating of milk to acquire the proper consistency. Third, you wait. That’s right, you wait. A freshly milked bowl of Luck Charms is too crunchy. You have to wait for both the little frosted oats and the marshmallows to soften. After a few minutes, it is time to dig in.
Now you don’t just eat spoonfuls of the cereal without discriminating a bit. You have to begin by eating all the perfectly softened frosted oats. They taste ok, but they aren’t great. At least they’re frosted. However, the real treat comes in the end.
Once you eat all the frosted oats you are left with marshmallows and sugary milk – pretty much heaven in a bowl. The marshmallows are fantastic at this point – soft on the outside with a very light crunch on the inside. Savor those marshmallows. Finally, once you are left with just the milk, drink it. It is the best tasting milk ever. They should make Lucky Charms branded milk. I would drink it over regular milk every day. It is that good.
Those were the good ol’ days. Two things ruined Lucky Charms. First, General Mills got greedy. At some point a few years ago they decided to reduce the marshmallow to frosted oats ratio. The number of marshmallows in a given bowl of Lucky Charms decreased significantly. They started doing all of these variations of Lucky Charms to hide that they were lowering the marshmallow count. They had miniature marshmallows, marshmallows that change colors when you add milk and all these other dumb variations. At the end of the day, the result was the same: there were fewer marshmallows in a given box.
Second, the whole grain revolution messed up the texture of the frosted oats. Something about the whole graininess tears up my mouth. I am now limited to at most one bowl. The grains strip away the first layer of tissue in my mouth and hurts for days. If there were still a bunch of marshmallows, I would suck it up. But combined with decreased marshmallow count Lucky Charms fell from glory.
R.I.P Lucky Charms.