47 Breakfast Cereals, Ranked By Lesbianism

Happy National Cereal Day! I hope you are celebrating the day by buying yourself new cereal bowls at the retailer of your choice, or by reading a plethora of cereal-related content we’ve produced for you here at Autostraddle.com.

Today I took on the “impossible” challenge of ranking breakfast cereals by Lesbianism. It is an arbitrary scale that accounts for numerous factors and considers many concepts, including queer sexualities that are not specifically “lesbian.” Previously, we have ranked the following items by lesbianism: Law & Order characters, Emojis, First Names.

For this ranking, I solicited opinions from the various humans who work here at Autostraddle.com, and their quotes are attributed as necessary below.

Let’s dig in before your Corn Flakes get soggy, shall we!

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47. Rip’s Big Bowl Engine 2 Plant Strong

“Strip for your honey dip
and never trust a man named Rip
or any man at all tbh”
– Lesbian proverb

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46. Special K

Special K is obsessed with making women lose weight through the compulsive consumption of processed carbohydrates and this feels like it is against the overall philosophy of lesbianism on multiple levels.

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45. Hulk Cereal

My hulk will be feminist or it will be bullshit.

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44. Multi-Grain Cheerios

We’re gay! We don’t want LESS woman, we want MORE WOMAN.

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43. Life

Lesbians are pro-choice.

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42. Cinnamon Life

Mey: Cinnamon Life
Because it’s an alternative lifestyle
For it to really work you need to write it as “life style”

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41. Razzle Dazzle Rice Krispies

Much like the early LGBT Rights Movement, way too focused on gay men.

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40. Oatmeal Squares

WE ARE NOT SQUARES, WE ARE A VERY ADVENTUROUS PEOPLE.

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39. Cookie Crisp

dufrau: I was looking at cookie crisp thinking they used to have a criminal for a mascot and striped shirts are gay, but he didn’t even wear stripes. Anyway he got replaced by his dog sidekick who got replaced by a wolf for reasons nobody can explain. I don’t know if this is gay, but it feels like it’s not.

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38. Cinnamon Toast Crunch

This cereal box is lesbian erasure because it features a picture of a man holding a tray of cinnamon toast instead of a lesbian shopping for cinnamon toast at Whole Foods. However Yvonne likes it “as a midnight snack,” so it’s still worthy of honor.

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37. Cracklin’ Oat Bran

The “Os” are for all the orgasms lesbians have that straight women don’t. Also if you run out of hoop earrings, you can use this cereal as oral sex target practice.

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36. Honey Nut Cheerios

Carolyn: Honey Nut Cheerios are gay because they are ubiquitous, just like homosexuality

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35. Grape Nuts

Lucy: Healthy, vegetarian (prob vegan?) and crunchy. Also versatile, can be the top(ping) or bottom on a parfait.

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34. Apple Jacks

Stef: there was a lot of bullying associated with liking apple jacks in their commercials in the 80s
BUT IT DOESN’T TASTE LIKE APPLES
they’re probably gay
Mey: I feel like anything with jack in the name is pretty gay (edited)
Lumberjack, jack halbestam, a cute mechanic using a jack- this is evidence for Apple Jacks

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33. Honey Bunches Of Oats

Carolyn: “Honey bunches of oats are gay because there’s a granola component and they contain lots of flakes, just like many gay people.”

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32. Nut ‘n Honey

Laneia: oh you know what’s lesbian is nut ‘n honey, bc the men would be like “what are you eaaaating?” and the woman would say “nut’n honey” and the dumb man would keep staring at the sports tv, but what if the woman was really eating cereal while fingerbanging the neighbor?

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31. Rasin Bran

Much like your girlfriend’s vagina after a very long bath in a polluted swamp, Rasin Brans are shriveled up, vaguely fruity and a wee bit soggy. But good!

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30. Frosted Flakes

Alaina: “because tony the tiger but three Rs in grrreat just like grrrl”

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29. Trix

Cameron: Personally identifying with Trix these days. Feeling very close to the rabbit who just wants a bowl of cereal and can’t because some assholes made up fake rules for rabbits.

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28. Cap ‘n Crunch

You may think that Cap ‘n Crunch’s clear worship of the hetero patirarchy, aristocracy and the military-industrial complex would give it a low score on the scale of “lesbian” to “LESBIAN.”

But, if you knew that the cereal’s famed flavor coating was invented by a microbiologist named Pamela Low who never married and spent her retirement in New Hampshire with “her Boston Terrier, Casey, and later another Boston Terrier named Winnie”… what then? What then.

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27. Weirdly Named Off-Brand Cereal That’s All You Can Afford After The Non-Profit You Used to Work For Got Its Funding Cut

Heather Davidson: I feel like ‘Weirdly Named Off-Brand Cereal That’s All You Can Afford After The Non-Profit You Used to Work For Got Its Funding Cut’ has to be ranked somewhere. We’ve all lived that honey loopers life at some point.

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26. Honey Smacks

Valerie: Honey Smacks look like… something… inappropriate…if you’re 12 like me. And also they are called Honey Smacks.
Dufrau: I dunno about Honey Smacks. The name feels right but frogs just feel mad hetero to me.
Mey: Frogs can literally change their reproductive organs if they’re in female only spaces so they can give birth without males
Riese: woah
Alyssa: YESSSSSSS
Mey: It’s the plot of Jurassic park!
Alyssa: hold onto your butts!
Mey: They use frog DNA to fill in the gaps and that’s why the dinosaurs are reproducing in the wild

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25. Morning O’s

These are the O’s you have alone under the covers while your ex (who still lives with you and still sleeps in your bed) is in the shower!

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24. Gorilla Munch

Lizz Rubin, via our 2012 Cereal Roundtable: I feel comfortable openly telling you that Gorilla Munch is a knock off of Kix, but really it’s so much more! For one, it’s gluten free. For another, there is a picture of a Gorilla on the front! When I’m out eating it in public I can tell what people are thinking. “Holy shit! That girl eats the same thing as a gluten free gorilla!” Nobody fucks with someone who eats like a gorilla and is also trying to reduce their gluten intake. No one.

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23. Shredded Wheat

Dufrau: shredded wheat is basically hay bales, lesbians love farming

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22. Girl Scout Cookies Cereal

As we learned yesterday, working at Girl Scout camp is a great way to meet a wife!

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21. Finding Nemo Cereal

There’s an Ellen DeGeneres in every box!

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20. Count Chocula

Heather: my vote is count chocula due to every other lesbian being a vampire and also you can link to erin’s mike pence tampons post
Stef: count chocula is definitely a lesbian
Heather: jinx!
Stef: heather JINX
GREAT MINDS, MY FRIEND
Molly: if you take the “o” out of count it’s even better

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19. Kashi Go Lean

Crystal: we eat kashi go-lean in my household
[my wife] katie likes to strike up convos about kashi with all the ladies in the cereal aisle
also it’s the only cereal we agree on. it’s the compromise cereal of our lesbian r/ship

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18. Kashi Sweet Potato Sunshine

“Sweet potato sunshine” is my safe word.

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17. Fruit Loops

Mey: Bowl of fruit loops put in the microwave for 45 seconds is very gay

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16. Reeses Puffs

Audrey: Reese’s Puffs are the most bisexual cereal, for people who want to have it both ways with chocolate AND peanut butter.

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15. Steel Cut Oats

Steel cut is a little-known lesbian haircut. Furthermore, queers have been known to enjoy steel-toed boots.

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14. Annie’s Homegrown Fruity Bunnies

It will surprise exactly nobody that Annie (who we all know is queer) didn’t have to leave her home to find those fruity bunnies.

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13. Active Balance Buckwheat & Qunioa

Way back in history, like shortly after dinosaurs roamed the earth, ancient tribes of lesbians were known to build their group shelters and gender-neutral bathrooms out of buckwheat and quinoa. You should try it. You’ll feel good!

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12. Rice Krispies

Since 1929, Rice Krispies have been bringing the tender story of a cheerful lesbian triad into the homes and mouths of innocent schoolchildren all over the world. Poly propaganda at its FINEST.

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11. Fruity Pebbles With Marshmallows

Mey: I love fruity pebbles and all sorts of sugar cereal and I don’t like being kinkshamed abt it

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10. A Taste of Honey Cereal

I wanted to stay away from discontinued cereals but I could’t stay away from the sweet sweet temptation of a taste of honey cereal.

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9. Organic Wild Puffs

“I hope the Organic Wild Puffs are playing at the Ohio Women’s Music Festival this year”
– a thing a lesbian has probably said

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8. Muffets

um

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7. Wheaties

Lucy: Wheaties — mainly for the box covered with hot athletes.

Fun fact: Wheaties put a lesbian on its box in 1935. Did any of you put a lesbian in your box or otherwise-identified genitalia in 1935? I didn’t think so. That makes Wheaties gayer than you. Unfortunately I cannot find a picture of the 1935 Babe Didrickson Wheaties box on the internet, which makes me never want to eat again!!!!

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6. Frosted Mini-Spooners

Mini-Spooners, y’all. MINI SPOONERS. “Frosted Mini-Spooners” is my Safe Space Word.

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5. Organic Indigo Morning

The official breakfast cereal of my favorite Spotify Radio station for “a morning drive to the gym when the news is too depressing to listen to NPR,” “Indigo Girls Radio.”

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4. Frankenberry

AHEM.

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3. Lucky Charms

Dufrau: “Lucky Charms has actual rainbows you can eat. Plus stealing leprechaun treasure is basically antiquing, which is gayer than rainbows.”

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2. Granola

Tied with hummus as the official food of the lesbian / bisexual / queer people. Granola is the crunch beneath our feet, the light of our loins and our reason for believin’. All this and more: Granola. (For more exposure to granola, please attend Laneia’s “Granola as Resistance” workshop at A-Camp 2017)

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1. Good Friends Cereal

They’re just good friends!

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Okay folks, now it’s your turn. I can’t wait to hear about which cereals you think I should’ve included or ranked differently, so please do NOT hold back. Also just a REMINDER that not all women have vaginas so please stay away from jokes about nuts and balls being inherently man-adjacent, thank you! Tell me how you are celebrating this important holiday. Tell me if you like to microwave your grape nuts or not. Tell me everything!

Roundtable: Let’s Talk About Cereal For Serious

We need to talk about cereal and how it’s the perfect food. It’s the best breakfast — two ingredients, one if you’re lazy. It’s also lunch, and dinner, and the meal that sometimes happens in between lunch and dinner, and also the other meal that you sometimes eat at three AM. We love cereal. You love cereal. Lesbians love cereal. This is common knowledge. But there are a lot of choices to be made! Sugary or fiber-filled? Colorful marshmallows or shredded wheat? Is dried fruit awesome or weird? Honey Nut or original?  And so, in the grand tradition of cookies, gas station candy, things to eat with peanut butter, drugstore cookies, and ways to consume melted cheese, we have to ask: which cereals do we love the MOST? Here, let us tell you.

Carrie, Community Managerette

Kashi Heart to Heart

Kashi Heart to Heart cereal is like your soul mate.

It first catches your eye when those adorable tiny hearts beckon you from across the aisle at Trader Joe’s. You take it home with you that very evening. The tastes is sweet and comfortable — a surprise considering the abruptness of your meeting. You feel safe with Heart to Heart. The more you learn about it the more you like it. It’s good to you, making sure you have enough antioxidants and heart-healthy vitamins and keeping your sodium low. It cares in ways no one else ever has.

Sure, there are other boxes to admire. Boxes of different colors, boxes with fancy toys, boxes making special offers for your devotion. But they boast only cheap thrills — a short-lived sugar rush or milky explosion in your mouth — and don’t compare to the security you get from Heart to Heart. A long-term commitment with any other suddenly seems improbable, even risky.

Before long, Heart to Heart is a staple in your apartment and you find it nearly impossible to be away from it for more than a few days. You introduce it to your friends and family. You begin to think that you’d even trust Heart to Heart with your future children. Of course there are days when you feel like trying something new or can’t seem to agree on whether to put it in milk or yogurt, but those feelings always pass by dinnertime. And when the sun comes up each morning, you can’t help think that there’s no other cereal you’d rather wake up with.

Carolyn, Contributing Editor

Honey Nut Cheerios

I have been eating Honey Nut Cheerios for as long as I have been able to digest solid foods, which means I have some very weird memories of it. For example: my parents always set the table for breakfast the night before, including putting the cereal box on the table, until the year we had a cat that was offended by the bee on the box and attacked accordingly, and we went downstairs to find the kitchen trashed and the cat sitting in my mother’s cereal bowl, which also explains why the cat lasted only a year.*

When it hadn’t been shredded, I read the box every morning, because that is what I did, and also because as a six year old apparently I had the memory of a goldfish.

And much like the cat, to this day I am put off by the talking bee mascot — originally, because it interrupted Xena (Xena and Bugs Bunny were the only two shows I was allowed to watch as a child); currently, because if a obnoxious talking bee the size of my head chasing me around and trying to steal my cereal isn’t the epitome of a nightmare, I don’t know what is.

I hear that they stopped using actual nuts a few years ago in favour of “natural flavours,” to which I can only say: I feel outraged, but did not notice until I read it on Wikipedia this morning.

Honey Nut Cheerios also has the unique advantage of being sort of like healthy cereal and sort of like junk food cereal, which is probably what has held my taste buds captive for so long. Also Omar Little likes them, so.

*(Kidding! My parents gave it away because of allergies. And it lived a happy life until it was eaten by a coyote in Saskatchewan.)

Crystal, Music Editor

Special K

A dilemma I’ve always had in relation to breakfast cereals is that some days I feel like something healthy and other days I feel like something ridiculously unhealthy, and I’m not a person who can afford to stock a selection of cereals in my cupboard.

That’s why I’m a huge fan of Special K, a highly flexible, all-in-one breakfast cereal that you can easily jazz the f*ck up to suit your needs. When I feel like being healthy, I’ll eat it with fresh strawberries and yoghurt. And when I’m feeling a little dusty I’ll throw in some sort of chocolate powder like Nesquik or Milo. The brilliance of Special K is that it tastes great when paired with anything or nothing at all – I’m also a fan of eating handfuls straight out of the box.

Special K marketers have described the cereal as having “the deliciously malty taste of crisp toasted wheat and rice flakes that are high in protein and low in GI”, and there’s not much I can add to that except to say that it is only available in Australia (I think) and perhaps contains more sugar than those annoying Special K television ads would have you believe.

Laura, Associate Editor

Toasted Oatmeal Flakes

One time I was at Trader Joe’s with my friend and we were picking out breakfast so I picked out the closest thing I could find to boxed cinnamon rolls (maple syrup and brown sugar shredded wheat) and she picked out what looked like the most humdrum box of cereal I’d ever seen: Toasted Oatmeal Flakes. As it turns out, the oatmeal flakes blew my shredded wheat out of the water (milk?). They taste kind of like crispy oatmeal cookies and are good as Traditional Breakfast Cereal with milk or in a baggie at snack time. Yes, they’re still mostly sugar, but they look and sound enough like adult food to convince me that eating them every morning will not rot my teeth.

Gabby, Contributor

Captain Crunch w/ Crunch Berries

Captain Crunch with Crunch Berries is absolutely devoid of nutrition. It’s packaged inside of a yellow box made of titanium and filled with a cereal made for breakfast marauders/berry pimps. I eat this cereal under very specific circumstances. Truth: this is my younger brother’s favorite cereal. I’ve bought family sized jumbo packs of CCwCBs and given them to him as Christmas presents, wrapped, tagged and under the tree. Phil is my fairy princess gay baby brother and I adore his simple ass. So, he’s got to be around. Two, I cannot be in a rush. This cereal is made of yellow number 6, blue number 8*, sugary magic and bricks. It’s HARD. You will scrape off your gums if you try to eat this straight out the gate. You must let the Captain and his Crunch Berries marinate in the milk for a minute. There should be enough time for you to put your laundry in the dryer, pass that d to the left and/or read this post about cereal with your bro. So here’s to all the homotastic siblings in the world who still bond over sugary kiddie breakfast cereal, may your bowls be deep, spoons be wide and dumbassery last forever.

*I made up the color numbers.

Lizz, Contributing Editor

Gorilla Munch

The thing about cereal is that I don’t really eat it in the morning. Do you have any idea how cold it is in New England at 6am? I much prefer a toasted bagel or some hot oatmeal. For me, cereal is exclusively an eat with my hands out of the box mid-day cereal. Usually an Ultimate Frisbee tournament or snowboarding snack. That means I need a cereal that’s easy to eat (no flakes or rice) and also has an excellent box. I’ve gotta have my Gorilla Munch from EnviroKids. I feel comfortable openly telling you that Gorilla Munch is a knock off of Kix, but really it’s so much more! For one, it’s gluten free. For another, there is a picture of a Gorilla on the front! When I’m out eating it in public I can tell what people are thinking. “Holy shit! That girl eats the same thing as a gluten free gorilla!” Nobody fucks with someone who eats like a gorilla and is also trying to reduce their gluten intake. No one.

Next: Cinnamon Toast Crunch, Rasin Bran and so much more!

If You Could Be Any Type of Cereal In The World, What Would You Be?

I use an online software situation called “formspring” which enables strangers to ask me questions, tell me how much they love me and tell me how much they hate me.

Recently, a person asked me a question on formspring that I’m having trouble answering! I want to say “Lucky Charms” but I feel like that’s cheating. Maybe you could help me.

“If you could be any type of cereal in the world, what would you be? Please explain.”

My 13 Ideas For Movies Starring Cereal Mascots

1. Captain Crunch replaces Jack Sparrow in the fifth installment, Pirates of the Caribbean: Bitch Better Have My Berries.

2. Remake of The Lion King with Tony the Tiger. Same title.

3. Blow 2 starring the Trix Rabbit.

4. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. writes “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” with Count Chocula as his cellmate.

5. The Coco Puffs bird in a remake of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.*

6. Buzz the Honey Nut Bee in a Social Network rip off about Google Buzz’s failure.

7. Lucky the Leprechaun in Leprechaun 4: Back to the Hood, Again.

8. Dig ‘Em The Honey Smacks Frog and the old WB frog team up for a Disney movie about an orphaned set of twins that decide to help keep Princess Tiana’s restaurant open by performing a modern day minstrel show.

9. Sugar Bear from Golden Crisp vs. Viral Bear in the style of Jason vs. Freddy.

10. Follow My Nose. A documentary on nose jobs gone wrong in the UK voiced by Toucan Sam.

11. Snap, Crackle, and Pop in the 5th installment, 3 Ninjas: Pimp Slap at Midnight

12. Film-noir piece about Boo Berry, a private eye that returns to earth to solve his widowed wife’s murder only to discover she’d been cheating on him for years…with a woman!

13. Fred and Barney in a prehistoric version of The Departed.

*Courtesy of Intern Grace

shoutout Lesbians Eating Cereal, whose interests this post seems relevant to.