Canned Spaghetti and Sugary Cereal Helped Me Reach My Biological Potential

When I was a bairn in the late 60s, the only Italian food I ever ate came in cans. Even the macaroni served at school came in enormous drums. At home, we ate canned spaghetti and raviolis from Franco American or Chef Boyardee. I was a fan of beefaghetti, and I sided with the cartoon dragon who claimed that the “most scrumptious food in the whole wide world” was beefaghetti and not its sister product beefaroni. Although I longed for the taste of old San Francisco, we never had ricearoni. Even when I visited San Francisco many years later, I didn’t see ricearoni on any of the menus in the restaurants.

The turning point in canned pasta technology was the discovery of spaghettio’s, “the neat round spaghetti you can eat with a spoon”, also known as “the greatest invention since the napkin”. At long last, we could eat canned pasta without the risk posed by fork tines. It wasn’t long before space buggies, canned noodles shaped vaguely like flying saucers, were discovered. One of my roommates in college had a can of space buggies for dinner every night. Seriously, he ate the same thing every single day. Fruity Pebbles for breakfast, a Whopper for lunch, and a can of space buggies. And some jolly ranchers.

I was in high school before I ever tasted pasta that had not been precooked and sealed into a can. My first introduction to high falutin’ dried pasta was some Kraft macaroni and cheese and then some dried spaghetti with a jar of Ragu. These became the base of my diet in college. You could get ten boxes of store brand mac and cheese for a buck at the A&P in Spring Valley. You could put anything in it (ground beef, tuna fish, mushrooms, onions, sausages) and have a complete hearty meal. If we were getting fancy, it was spaghetti with a jar of sauce and maybe some ground meat.

You can imagine what a treat it was for me to discover Belmont, the “Little Italy of the Bronx”, where you could get fresh pasta made before your very eyes. Now I don’t think I could even eat a can of spaghetti. What I once loved is now dead to me.

The same goes for breakfast cereal. The ten year old Vache Folle delighted in Quisp, Honeycomb, Sugar Corn Pops and Kap’n Krunch. I couldn’t get enough of it. Later in college, I moved to corn flakes, raisin bran and rice chex with the occasional heaping bowl of Kap’n Krunch. Then I got all health conscious and started eating muesli and various colon cleansing high fiber concoctions that tasted like twigs and gravel. Then I became carb averse and swore off cereal altogether, not a big sacrifice considering that I had grown to hate the stuff. I bet Kap’n Krunch is still pretty good, though. Note to self: buy a box of KK this weekend. Is it me or has Honeycomb cereal gotten smaller?