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Canada is preserving artifacts from my childhood June 23, 2008

Posted by Wade Rockett in Miscellany.
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During a recent business trip to Vancouver — my first visit to Canada — I stopped at a Safeway to see if I could find a boxed pastry that a Canadian friend of mine told me to look out for. I saw no Passion Flakies there, but when I took a turn through the cereal aisle I was seized with a sense of profound disorientation as I beheld something I haven’t seen since I was a kid in the 70s: Sugar Crisp cereal.

Sometime after 1979 (Lazyweb?) the cereal’s name was changed to “Super Golden Crisp” in the U.S. But not, apparently, in Canada.

Given how taboo the word “sugar” is in kid’s products now, the Canadian version felt kind of subversive to me. It opened a window onto an alternate world of strange possibilities, where the names of foods highlight their main ingredients instead of concealing them.