Back when I was a child, all the way through when I got out of Greenfield High School (note I say “got out of” and not “graduated from”), my mom woke me for school every morning. Until I started wearing dungarees (as she called them), she would iron my pants right before I left so I could walk to school on freezing Massachusetts mornings with warm legs. She would offer to cook me anything I wanted for breakfast. I could have had bacon and eggs, pancakes, or porridge. Fuck! Norman Rockwell never heard of a childhood as perfect as mine.
So I had my choice of any breakfast food mixed with my mom’s love, but being a callow asshole, I would insist on a bowl of cold cereal, with a cheap plastic toy inside the box. In the long run, a bowl of sugar and plastic that’s advertised on TV isn’t better than a mother’s love. In the short run, however, they were tied.
Today I’m an oatmeal man. When I’m living right, I take a bowl of minute oatmeal, add some maple syrup and almond milk, and throw my bowl in the microwave for three minutes. Then I cut up a banana on top, and I call that breakfast. But Maxim wanted to transport me back to my youth by having me eat a shit-ton of cold breakfast cereals and pick my 10 favorites. Eating bowl after bowl was a reminder that way back when, my mom loved me enough to give me all the sugar and plastic I wanted.
10. Puffins Original [Barbara’s Bakery]
I love the name of this cereal. I’ve seen puffins, and they are some goofy, lovable little birds. It also says on the box that Puffins are “all natural.” I have no idea why “all natural” is supposed to be good. HIV and arsenic are “all natural.” Anyway, Puffins are a fine little cereal. 
9. Honey Nut Cheerios [General Mills]
Cheerios bring back memories. I actually don’t think I ate them much as a kid, though; maybe it’s some sort of Jungian memory, I don’t know. But they have so much sugar, it’s great. 
8. Cinnamon Chex [General Mills]
Awesome. These are basically sugar with that “party mix” vibe underneath. Really good.
7. Peak Protein [Bear Naked]
This is hippie granola that doesn’t say “organic.” Maxim sent me plenty of organic cereals, but there are none on this list. That’s because the word “organic,” when not followed by the word “chemistry” to mean “carbon based,” makes me fucking bug-nutty. At best, “organic” on food is a lying scam, and at worst it’s rich Americans not giving a fuck how many people in developing nations they kill by decreasing the amount of food that can be grown on an acre in order to adhere to “organic” standards. I had to mention it or you’d wonder why just putting the word “organic” on the box automatically puts your product behind “Toasted Piss-Frosted Goat Shitlets” on my scorecard.
Peak Protein really does taste like it was made by some dirty hippie in a dirty hippie kitchen—but I’m positioning that as a good thing. It’s delicious. Very chewy. You actually get tired chewing it. The sunflower seeds and cinnamon mix together nicely. The only drawback is the raisins. I like soft raisins. These are hard raisins. These are Pamela Anderson raisins and not Kitten Natividad raisins. 
6. Golden Crisp [Post]
This cereal used to be called Sugar Crisp. They let the bear on the box keep his Sugar Bear T-shirt, but they changed the name of the cereal to Golden Crisp. I don’t know if that’s because sugar is bad now, but it makes no difference to me. I think sugar is good. This tastes like being a child to me. I guess it really is just eating sugar—whoops, I mean gold—but I like it.
5. Grape-Nuts [Post]
Grape-Nuts is the egg cream of cereals (no egg, no cream; no grapes, no nuts). It has to be one of the most satisfying foods. It sure isn’t sweet enough, but it definitely feels like you’re eating food. I haven’t had it in a while, but I’m going to start eating it again. I ate it for this article with milk, but I’m going to start putting it in yogurt with jam again. Lots of jam. They say the difference between jam and jelly is I can’t jelly my cock up your ass…but I think I can. I like Grape-Nuts.
4. Frosted Mini-Wheats [Kellogg’s]
I love the feeling of shredded wheat. I love healthy bird food with a fun-to-eat feel. Then you spray them with sugar, and I’m there. I love the way they interact with milk; they get soggy in a cool way. And I like them dry right out of the box, too. My friend Jessie says that being an adult means being able to eat candy for breakfast. Some people can’t admit that they want candy for breakfast, so there are a lot of cereals, like this, that just give candy a different name and put it in a box for breakfast.
3. Cinnamon Toast Crunch [General Mills]
I had never tried it before this article, so there’s no nostalgia for the cereal, but a lot of nostalgia for my mom’s cinnamon toast. Man, it’s the perfect cinnamon-sugar toast taste. Once again, I’ve learned that if you put enough sugar on packing peanuts, I’ll eat them. 
2. Frosted Flakes (of Corn) [Kellogg’s]
It’s hard to be fair in this article because it’s all about comfort and nostalgia. Man, when I taste “Sugar Frosted Flakes”—and they are sugar-frosted—I’m just happy. Have a bowl now. Man, they’re good. My sister-in-law, who works in advertising for General Mills, said, “Do you know how much sugar is in that cereal?” Like it was a bad thing. Maybe it is, but I like sugar. What bothers me is, why do you need a parenthetical in the name of a cereal? Why is “of corn” parenthetical? It’s the “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party)” of cereal names. 
1. Cocoa Krispies [Kellogg’s]
These are the best; they taste like food and candy together, but more like candy. I wish Snap, Crackle, and Pop were different characters for the Cocoa Krispies box, but I guess that’s dangerous thinking. Truthfully, Count Chocula has a much better name and a better box. The art on the Chocula box is really hip and minimalist, and I love word plays that are this far from successful: “Chocula” sounds nothing like “Dracula.” It’s not even a good pun. It’s just a crazy person naming cereal out their ass, and I like that. Count Chocula is great cereal, but the marshmallows fuck it up. I don’t like little cereal marshmallows. My children love Lucky Charms, and they pick those fucking marshmallows out and just eat them, but those marshmallows piss me off. I prefer soft, Jayne Mansfield marshmallows.
With Cocoa Krispies, there’s that rice vibe that makes it seem like it might be food, but that chocolate candy vibe is the most important part. Man, it’s just great. When I wake up hungry in the middle of the night, this is what I want. I had a box by the bathtub for a while, and I would get up in the middle of the night to take a bath and read and eat these by the handful like a naked wet giant ravenous hairy missing link. (Maybe not the image you want in your head, but I have to live it.) Little escaped Krispies would fall into the bathwater, and the next morning there would be washed-out, dried-up bunches of rice around the drain, which proves the caloric content of my bathwater could have nourished Asia. This is good eating.