Oatmeal and Me

Nov 2019

There is no better way to start a day than with a steamy bowl of oatmeal. The warm, comforting sludge, both a thousand individual oats and also a single cohesive food, drizzles into my mouth. Flecks of cinnamon add an almost holiday tang to the milky mix. Toppings as varied as the animals in a jungle sit around my kitchen, ready to reveal taste combinations I didn’t know existed. But I appreciate oatmeal for so much more than merely its culinary merits. Oatmeal symbolizes many deep beliefs I hold.

Contrast it to cold cereal, for instance. I had a long phase in my elementary-school years when I began my day with a bowl of Cheerios. I was one for a crunchy cereal, so I always tried to eat as close to the second I poured in my milk as I could. If I so much as chewed before swallowing, the poor remaining Cheerios would get soggy under my watch, so I wolfed it all down in a matter of minutes. The need for speed in this delicate operations immediately ruled out microwaving it for hot cereal. At the end of my breakfast, I would shiver from the cold food I had ingested.

Compare that cold, rushed reality with the healing serenity of the oat. The oat wants nothing more than to soak for hours in milk to become fuller and tastier. The oat wants to be served warm and steamy, where it can heat me from the inside out and heal me the same way chicken noodle soup heals the sick. Unlike cold, crunchy cereal, oatmeal offers an incentive to be patient. In mornings that can often turn into whirlwinds, this tranquility roots me.

And the roots of oatmeal itself are in peace and tolerance. The leading oatmeal brand in the United States is Quaker Oats Company, whose history lies with the Quakers of 1600s Pennsylvania. Quakers preached religious tolerance and refused to participate in wars. All that history imbues oatmeal with a moral character that reflects the pinnacle of what I want to achieve. Why is it, then, that most of the oats I eat nowadays are not from the Quaker Oat Company, but rather from nameless brands that sell their product cheaper?

The answer is capitalism, in which I am a firm believer. Capitalism is not a perfect economic system, but for that matter no system is perfect. What capitalism does right is to relentlessly drive up the efficiency of the economy. Quaker oats relied on name brand marketing to ensure that I would buy its product off the shelves of my local grocery store. For decades, this brand recognition meant they could charge higher prices for the same product than other companies could. That all changed when large supermarket chains like Safeway and Costco realized they could produce oats much more cheaply and then place them right next to the Quaker oats product on the shelf. These chains started selling store-brand oatmeal, which I proudly buy in support of capitalism.

But even though my wallet no longer funnels into the Quaker Oat Company, it still finds ways to promote similar values of peace and tolerance. The toppings I use--cinnamon, bananas, peanuts--come from different corners of the Earth. Cinnamon comes from Indonesia and China, peanuts come from India and Africa, bananas come from Central America. International cooperation enables my morning oatmeal; conversely, my morning oatmeal enables international cooperation. Trade agreements and peaceful relations between countries are vital to ensuring that a banana grown thousands of miles away can find its way into my bowl of oatmeal.

Oatmeal cures so much for me. How would it have changed the lives of some famous characters from fiction? Take Monsieur Meursault from Albert Camus’ absurdist novel The Stranger. Meursault suffers from a severe case of apathy to all life around him, preferring to bend like grass to the wills of others rather than create his own identity. He consistently fails to use the ethics that come naturally to most people. When his friend Raymond asked him to testify falsely that Raymond’s girlfriend had cheated on him, Meursault said, “It didn’t matter to me, but I didn’t know what I was supposed to say” (Camus 37). When Meursault’s girlfriend Marie asked him whether he loved her and wanted to marry her, Mersault said only, “It didn’t make any difference to me and that we could if she wanted to” (Camus 41). Later in the book, Meursault’s extreme indifference leads him to shoot an Arab, and for this he is tried, convicted, and executed. How could oatmeal have helped Meursault?

To eat oatmeal requires an intimate connection with oneself and with one’s values. It’s not a food that comes with the baggage of the high culture of the past, but rather it carries a more rough worker mindset. Oatmeal represents so much that it needs a person who is equally grounded ethically and morally to eat it. What Meursault needs is to assimilate into the oatmeal lifestyle, in other words to form opinions of his own. Putting the absurdist debate aside and agreeing that Meursault’s old personality got him killed, Meursault’s lack of personal opinions was his downfall. Oatmeal would have imbued him with a better sense of himself.

In rapid fire succession, how could oatmeal have prevented the philosophical paradoxes faced by other fictional characters? Consider dull Joel and fiery Clementine from the 2004 movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Clementine and Joel fall in love, grow tired of each other after a few years, then through a sci-fi company that removes memories, choose to forget each other. Again strangers, however, they reunite as love shows that it is all-powerful. A nice ending, but it was painful to get to that point. What if the two lovers were also oatmeal-lovers? Then Clementine’s wild aspect would tame, because one cannot love oatmeal without revering its roots. That would bring one dimension of her closer to Joel’s personality, perhaps just close enough that they never would have broken up.

Or take pre-teen Rose from the acclaimed 2014 graphic novel This One Summer. On a summer trip to the vacation town of Awago, Rose begins to notice the older teenagers and their lives, trying to become more adult herself. The issue is that the teenagers of Awago acted as bad role models. Combined with Rose’s mother and father growing distant over a miscarriage they try to keep secret from Rose, she internalizes a false vision of what it means to be an adult. But what if Rose and her family began their summer days with steamy oatmeal? Oatmeal requires patience to soak and cook, and patience is exactly what Rose and her family lacked. Communication solves problems better than water dissolves salt. If Rose and her family had breakfast together over a bowl of oatmeal, if they sat down with each other and tolerated themselves enough to talk, then communication would start to work its magic.

Oatmeal has altered my life forever and for the better. It represents all the values I hold closest, from patience to international cooperation, from tolerance to the strength of capitalism. Oatmeal is the best of the modern world. Of course, there are no simple answers. Stepping away from the rose-tint of cherry picking, there are certain flaws with oatmeal, too. The milk in oatmeal supports a cruel dairy industry that enslaves millions of cows. The United States has fought wars in Central America over the bananas with which I adorn my oats. I don’t support any of that. Nonetheless, I love oatmeal with all my heart. The final card up my sleeve is that I am fundamentally a stoic. I believe that I should care about only what I can control. That’s why, despite its flaws, I am indebted to oatmeal and plan to eat it with gusto for years to come.