As a climate skeptic I couldn’t care less about recycling, carbon footprints, “lights on” Earth Hour, or any of the other claptrap associated with the green religion. But the breathtakingly wasteful lifestyle choices of the allegedly green “Millennials” put my efforts to enjoy the advantages of consumerist living to shame.
Cereal, a Taste of Nostalgia, Looks for Its Next Chapter
…
“The cereal category is certainly shifting,” said Melissa Abbott, director of culinary insights for the Hartman Group, a consumer food research organization. “Consumers over all are less interested in industrially processed grains as a meaningful start to their day.”
Some organic and other brands perceived as more healthful are selling well, so General Mills has added three organic cereals to its Annie’s line of children’s foods. By April, it hopes to introduce Frosted Oat Flakes, Berry Bunnies and Cocoa Bunnies in Whole Foods stores.
Kellogg’s, which Mr. Bryant told investors this month had not always been on top of consumer tastes, is banking on a better mix of healthful cereals. It has just introduced a Nourish line of Special K with quinoa, and is looking at ways to repackage cereal into single servings and more eco-friendly bags.
The dream of all these companies is to capture the all-powerful and elusive millennial eater, who just isn’t all that into cereal for breakfast. It’s just too much work, for one thing. Almost 40 percent of the millennials surveyed by Mintel for its 2015 report said cereal was an inconvenient breakfast choice because they had to clean up after eating it.
…
Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/24/dining/breakfast-cereal.html
I mean, wow, I’m impressed. Millennials can’t be bothered eating cereal, because it is too much bother to sling the used bowl into the dishwasher – the cereal doesn’t come in a disposable container.
I’d love to see green ideas like reducing your carbon footprint get serious traction with that demographic.
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Perhaps I can help.
The Boomers are so habituated to their own philosophies and hobby horses that they cannot necessarily recognize them, ubiquitous and undesirable as these philosophies are. Boomers need a little help. Take the last sentence in the article, for example.
It says,
Now what kind of question is that? Who is asking younger people in polls if it is too inconvenient to put away their own cereal dish? What kind of vain and silly question is this?
I think that the Millennials ought to be complimented for giving silly answers to silly questions. They might be also commended for telling vain Boomer marketers just what they want to hear, and allowing them to draw the conclusions they want to draw. The conclusion the marketers wish to reach is that it is necessary to package portions individually in order to get control of the food supply.
If a Boomer marketer asks you if you are too lazy to do your dishes, what will you answer? How could anyone resist answering a fool according to his folly?
Zeke June 13, 2016 at 8:24 am:
“Perhaps I can help.”
Or perhaps not.
Zeke: “The Boomers are so habituated to their own philosophies and hobby horses that they cannot necessarily recognize them, ubiquitous and undesirable as these philosophies are. Boomers need a little help.”
Don’t just say something like that without some details, give the poor ole Boomers some help. What undesireable philosophies and hobby horses are Boomers habituated to?
Sure. I continued in a second post, below this one.
Let’s continue to examine which generation this article is really about. Does this article really have anything to do with Millenials? I am going to present the case that this study has nothing to do with Millenials at all.
First let’s look at the intention of the study.”The dream of all these companies is to capture the all-powerful and elusive millennial eater…”
Here it is plain that the analysts and experts are selling a marketing approach to the cereal companies. Their results are measurements called polling data. Very sciency–it has numbers! In this case, it appears that the advantageous thing to do is go organic and package food only in individual portions.
I am going to suggest that this is organic activism done by the Cannabis Generation, packaged as polling data and as a market demand from Millenials.
Remember, organic food only produces about 1% of the food grown and produced in the US, because it is so unreliable and expensive. It is also a destructive and disruptive niche market, because it reintroduces many microorganisms that conventional growers have almost completely eradicated. For example, organic growers have problems with Stinking Smut in their wheat. Organic growers are extremely aggressive and hawk their wares as good for the planet, but their foods are no better than renewables and their effects on the food supply are in the end deletarious, just like renewables.
This is not about Millenials.
I find it amazing that of 130+ comments, only one picked up on cleanup being inconvenient.
The response was that millenials are strapped for time – so they do what, instead? Hit Starbucks for a latte and a croissant?
Eric,
Well, lately I find eating cereal for breakfast a bit inconvenient too, not because I will have to rinse/wash the bowl and spoon, but because I feel compelled to go out to the garden and get some fresh strawberries to put on the cereal . . and slice them up a bit . . which means rinsing the knife too . . and the little plastic cutting board thingy I cut them on . . don’t want to mess with the whole wooden cutting board just to deal with a bit of juice . . and, deal with the tops of course . .
But it’s going out and getting the berries mostly, which means bending down (a lot), and pushing the leaves around so I don’t miss any ripe ones . . so the bugs won’t become a problem because they are feasting on the unpicked ripe ones and multiplying right there in the strawberry bed. And if previous years are any measure, I’ll feel compelled to do this till, like, late October.
But, my main reason fro commenting is to ask you not to use the phrase “climate skeptic” as though you really were skeptical of climate . . It’s silly I feel, and just a few more keystrokes, inconvenient as they might seem, could make clear what you ARE skeptical of. Which, I suspect is what the mass media/climate alarmists don’t want you to do, since “civilian” readers might realize they are (for the most part, given rather low polling of the supposed “climate crisis”) themselves climate ALARM skeptics.
; )
Millenials are the product of the waste of the generation before us, the financial crash, unfordable mortgages, intense competition in the jobs market, a need to upskill every year. Millenials have it the toughest.
That Mossy Guy “Millenials have it the toughest.”
They will soon enough when their parents are dead and the money’s gone, including the pretend money called the national debt.
That debt isn’t going to disappear.
That Mossy Guy wrote “That debt isn’t going to disappear.”
It might, but I was not speaking of debt, I was speaking of money that debt brings into existence. When I buy something on credit for $100, I just created $100; it came into existence, a type of security.
Thus, 16 trillion dollars came into existence as that debt was accumulated. But eventually this funny money will be worthless just as it was in Germany after World War One.
The debt could be paid if there was $16 trillion in circulation to pay it, but that leaves the problem of interest. You could use every dollar ever created to exactly pay the principal of the debt and now you have no money to pay the interest.
The only choice is to devalue the dollars used to pay the debt AND its interest.
Or simply cancel the debt and suffer some consequences.
You know I’m a professional in finance right ?
That Mossy Guy “You know I’m a professional in finance right?”
I do not understand comments ending with “right?”
If you are asking me whether I know this, the answer is no and it certainly isn’t obvious from your most recent comment.
Your assertion was “Millenials are the product of the waste of the generation before us, the financial crash, unfordable mortgages, intense competition in the jobs market, a need to upskill every year” — as if every generation since ancient Sumeria has not faced the same problems. Is there anything that makes “Millenials” special? Yes, the internet and smartphones. Never before has there been a mechanism to turn humans into herring so that ten million Millenials can all turn at the same time in the same direction. It is an emergent phenomenon having nothing to do with the same problems every generation has faced since forever.
Asserting that you are a professional simply means you are being paid presumably for something related to finance. It is not proof of correctness. The debt, which I wasn’t discussing, disappears when either or both parties decide it has disappeared. What exactly is debt? It is an obligation. Can obligations be abrogated? Sure, you betcha and it can go the other way: Iceland has the unique property of increasing personal debt automatically; the loan principal is indexed to inflation! But it works only because the debtor accepts the obligation. Debt doesn’t exist in time and space; it is a product of a human mind.