by Tim Griton
Ville Voice Eats Correspondent

How are you controlling your cholesterol? Are you eating right?

Right.

Eating right seems to be the hardest thing these days, but we thought we had a panacea with the General Mills juggernaut Cheerios. You’ve seen the playful commercial with the husband and wife competing to see who would reach their goal first. He, finishing the job jar (probably filled up by her) and she, lowering her cholesterol by eating Cheerios for breakfast. She got the idea from the cereal box that says “lower your cholesterol four-percent in six weeks.”

Right.

The Food and Drug Administration is giving Cheerios the big nuh-uhh on that claim. You see there’s a rule that says you can’t pinpoint risk reduction. The letter the FDA sent on May 5th called the box’s wording an “unapproved drug claim.” General Mills has 15 days to correct the problem. For its part General Mills is still saying that Cheerios is still good for you and the FDA’s problem is with the copy used.

To quote a certain spokes-gecko, “we’ve been duped.”

But honestly, this isn’t the first time food labels have fooled us. What was your reaction when you found out that your Caesar Salad had nothing to do with Julius Caesar? Wasn’t that the story? In reality it was named after chef Caesar Cardini, the guy that created it. Next time you’re at the Spaghetti Factory and you’re taking in the menu that’s so closely connected with ancient Rome, with a side order of Greece, think about your choice of leafy greens and see if it doesn’t leave a little pang in your belly.

On the other hand, we’re pretty safe in assuming there’s no duck in duck sauce or actual ears in elephant ears, but what about something like Rocky Mountain (prairie) oysters? Did you think it was made from little mollusks from the Colorado River? When you found out exactly what part of the bull it came from, did you do an involuntary purge? Did it make you wonder who figured out that it was edible?

Or, closer to category, there’s a product called Grape-Nuts, which contains neither. So General Mills and its Cheerios isn’t the first to walk the line. I remember the first time my wife brought home sweetbreads. Thinking they were fried and sweetened pastries, I pounced. Imagine my surprise at that first bite. It didn’t taste like a danish at all. Nor was it supposed to, as she told me that I was eating calf pancreas.

Thinking back on that incident, all of a sudden, the General Mills transgression doesn’t seem so bad.