Part of a healthy breakfast?

In Tips for Writers, Dave Barry ponders the phrase “part of a complete breakfast”

Dear Mister Language Person: I am curious about the expression, "Part of this complete breakfast." The way it comes up is, my 5-year-old will be watching TV cartoon shows in the morning, and they'll show a commercial for a children's compressed breakfast compound such as "Froot Loops" or "Lucky Charms, " and they always show it sitting on a table next to a some actual food such as eggs, and the announcer always says: "Part of this complete breakfast." Don't they really mean, "Adjacent to this complete breakfast, " or "On the same table as this complete breakfast"? And couldn't they make essentially the same claim if, instead of Froot Loops, they put a can of shaving cream there, or a dead bat?

A. Yes.

 

Looking back on how I fed my family, I feel like I was fooled into not feeding them as well as I could have, by phrases just like that . I’m not a conspiracy theorist by any means. I don’t really think that big business conspired with the FDA to make us fat. I do however don’t believe that big business has our best interests in mind, their loyalty is to the bottom line. It’s our job to be informed consumers.

Reading labels is something that I've always done. I don't know why it took me such a long time to read the labels on Ramen noodles and Capri Sun juice drinks. I felt virtuous giving my kids the juice drinks instead of soda. Until the words 10% real juice caught my eye. What about the other 90%? I felt betrayed and frankly a bit dumb. But Ramen noodles, they had been invented as a cheap source of food, surely they were good for you. I cried when I read that they tasted so good because of the fat and salt. It was common knowledge  that fat was not good for you, and I wasn't going to give my kids something with so much fat and salt.

When my girls were little they hated sandwiches, so I would make them ham roll ups. Ham and cheese slices rolled up together. I’d cut up carrots and other veggies or throw in a small bag of chips, dessert was fruit or a couple of  cookies. When Lunchables came out. I bought a few, but soon realized that I could make them cheaper myself. So the kids got crackers with little rounds of ham and cheese. Turns out they would have been better off with the ham roll ups.

Unlike the Ramen noodles and Capri Sun juice drinks, reading the label didn't give me a clue that crackers weren't nutritious. When I put Goldfish in their lunches instead of chips and homemade cookies instead of Jello, I was doing them wrong.

Unlike most other kids, at least they still ate vegetables and fruit. When Mijo was in elementary school he asked me to stop putting fruit in his lunches. Puzzled, I asked him why? He liked fruit, why didn't he want to eat it anymore? He explained that he was getting lots of fruit. The school had a table where kids were encouraged to put the foods they didn't want instead of throwing it away. He said there was always lots of apples, oranges and stuff like that. He didn't like seeing all that food go to waste. However, he said that he never saw any cookies on that table so it would be okay, if I still sent those.

My oldest daughter, La Primera, hated breakfast food, she would rather have soup or the left overs from the previous night’s dinner than cereal. Wanting to be a good mom, I started to buy frozen waffles in order to entice her to eat a “healthy breakfast”.  I think her skin started to break out around that time but I didn’t make the connection with simple carbs.

My kids have homes of their own now, their meals are outside my control. If I could use the wayback machine and change what I fed them I would. Soup for breakfast, great! No sandwiches? brilliant! We could compromise on the cookies.