Let them eat cereal – really?!

Recently, Kellogg's CEO Gary Pilnick recommended that families serve "cereal for supper" to beat inflation. This reminded me of Marie Antoinette, queen of France, who supposedly declared, "Let them eat cake," to the starving citizens of Paris upon their storming Versailles. Are we to dine on cereal for breakfast and dinner too, to further enrich the pockets of this member of the oligarchy?

I know that Kellogg's cereal started out as a health food in the Corn Belt, but the sugary concoctions of today don't make a dinner that's satisfying or nutritious. It'd be like one of those light girlie dinners I recently read about that single women can make for themselves. Some samples were crackers, cheese and grapes on a saucer.

My great-aunt Willana McCabe Magee used to say, "We're having ‘skip’ tonight.” This would not mean that she was spreading Skippy peanut butter in the p.m., but that she didn't feel like cooking and meant to skip dinner altogether. Our Sunday night dinners often consist of leftovers in the styrofoam containers lining our refrigerator from Friday or Saturday night dinners out. That's a half-skip in my book.

I am lucky enough so far to be taken out on Friday and Saturday nights. Jeff has soldiered through this ceremony through most of our marriage, probably because I prepare "Leave It to Beaver” TV show-type dinners most weeknights. We tried dining in the formal dining room once, and out on the glass-topped table on the porch, once again, but those didn't last long.

Now, as empty-nesters, we dine on TV trays in front of Nora O'Donnell's evening news. I try to stage eating and not cleaning up when "Jeopardy" is on, so I can show off my broad range of knowledge. Unfortunately, this has not made me a millionaire or even a “Jeopardy” contestant. Besides, I know I'd flub up the buzzer and freeze. Jeff is very smart, but I must show off. Being a Luddite, I can't even work the device that everyone, including 3-year-olds, can manipulate. He even tries to escape by doing the dishes, a benefit for me, but I want him there to see me answer the complex questions because as the old saying goes, "If a tree falls in the forest and there's no one there, who hears it?"

I gained this knowledge by being an outlier, reading the encyclopedias and the dictionary in the old days when my mother and grandmother would play cards every night at the dining room table with some long-ago Miltonians. You may remember some of them, if you're my age: Ed Scott, Helen Scott, Roxie (Ed's mother) and her husband Whitey, and Gladys Brittingham plus Jack Bushey, my classmate and neighbor. That was another use for a dining room table back then. My grandmother was so addicted to cards and bingo that she would play solitaire when she had no card-playing partners. I can hear the slapping of the cards as I think of her now.

Groceries weren't so expensive back then. Our kitchen was small, and a week’s worth of groceries could be stored on two tall shelves and squeezed in the corner of the kitchen. My mother and grandmother would have to climb a stepladder to reach them. There was always a big dinner every weeknight then, too. My father worked at the King Cole cannery, which has been transformed into the Dogfish Head Brewery down the street. That's the main reason why my parents moved to Milton during World War II, plus the fact that in Laurel, where my mother taught school at that time, teachers could not be married.

One time Belgian farmers came to teach my father how to grow Petite Point Peas, and I would hear stories of the Birdseye Frozen Foods people coming to the factory. Mr. Porter, the inventor of the viner and other farm machinery, would come to dinner and spread silver dollars on the table for me to rake off with my sleeve and keep – maybe that was an early form of my dusting technique!

Those were all past good uses for the dining room table, where my mother would wave the styrofoam meat containers from the grocery around to show admiring company how much she paid for the steaks we were eating that night. Today, the roast chickens are picked up from Food Lion on the way home. Upstate at the Shop Rite, they spun on shish-kabob-like spits in glass cases.

Who bakes chicken from scratch these days, let alone fry chicken when Quick Stop is right down the road? I once had a coupon to buy an uncooked chicken and do it yourself from start to finish! It read, "Be brave and cook your own chicken! One dollar off!" You had better be fast to get one of those pre-baked chickens at Food Lion if you don't want to do it yourself. I saw my Turban Lady friend who runs the deli loading a dozen or more of them into the oven at Food Lion one recent afternoon. They were glistening with some kind of oil brushed on them as she shoved them in the oven door. The aroma is captivating.

The best time to grab one is between 3 and 5 p.m. I've found that taking one home in its see-through plastic bag makes almost as easy a dinner as serving bowls of cereal. Add a candlelabra and your finest silverware, and it's almost Versailles!