Oreo O-No's

Remember Oreo O's? Post made the delicious chocolatey white-speckled cereal over a period of about nine years before discontinuing it. Oreo O's haven't existed since 2007, and that's sad.

A few months ago I wanted the cereal badly enough to consider ordering a few boxes online, but, alas, it wasn't available anywhere. Plus, it all would've expired like three years ago. So you'll understand how excited I was when I spotted a (fresh) box of my favorite Oreo-flavored cereal on the shelf of a South Korean grocery store. I grabbed the box and then another, using shrill, high-pitched noises to communicate to Joe that the boxes I held were anomalies of space and time and so I had to have them. He told me to put one of the boxes back, but a few minutes later, I left that store with a beautiful blue cereal box in my hands.

By the end of the five-minute walk back to our apartment, I'd pulled the box open and struggled with the shiny bag inside long enough for Joe to have taken it away and opened it for me. I stuck my hand in there and pulled out a few pieces of cereal and ate them.

And they weren't Oreo O's at all. They didn't look right, and they sure didn't taste right.

Do those brown things in the bowl look anything like the generously-white-thing-sprinkled cereal pieces on the box? No. They don't. Because they aren't generously white-thing-sprinkled.

I could've gotten over the lack of sprinkles. But the flavor.....at first, it was only a little bit "off." Then came the aftertaste. That's when I became pretty sure that the cereal had been manufactured using some kind of bean product rather than corn.

I could be wrong on that, and I can't read the ingredient list or even find it because everything on the box is written in Hangul, but it might make sense. Beans are used in some surprising ways here, like as a topping for a popular frozen treat. And the cereal's aftertaste definitely wasn't the corn-based-cereal aftertaste.

On that day, a shining moment of hope burst into flame and burned until nothing was left but a nasty aftertaste.

...but...if you just put them in a bowl with some milk, don't eat any of them plain, and ignore the aftertaste...it's almost like reliving the lazy Saturday mornings of your youth. Almost.

(EDIT: A few weeks and a few bowlfuls later, I'm starting to think that maybe this is what they always tasted like. Maybe I'm just growing accustomed to the weirdness.)