Photo: ©2011 Rob Ritzenthaler and Don Chick

While many of us have ditched the cereals of our youths (in all their freeze-dried marshmallowy glory) in favor of flax seed (boring!), the eye-popping colors and kooky designs on the cereal boxes of our childhoods still have a pull, which is why we're loving The Great American Cereal Book.

The compendium has a spine cleverly designed as the nutritional information panel on a box and starts with the food's paleolithic era (aka 1903), when Tryabita Cereal Mills marketed a celery-flavored hot cereal--which certainly sounds healthy--and goes up to the 1990s and 2000s (of note is 1993's very meta Rice Krispies Treats cereal, a cereal that tastes like treats made out of...cereal). Other bits we're crunching on: the freeze-dried marshmallows in Lucky Charms, Count Chocula and Baron von Redberry are called "marbits"; and, as we long suspected, Grape Nuts probably don't have anything to do with grapes: According to Post, the cereal got its name because its inventor, C. W. Post, claimed grape sugar was formed during the backing process and that the cereal had a nutty flavor. And then there are the characters, from the Trix rabbit to Tony the Tiger to Snap!, Crackle!, Pop!, and Pow! (yes, there once were four, but Pow! got the boot sometime in the late 1950s).

Forget cereal's bad rap (the sugar, the unpronounceable ingredients, the funny colors it turns your milk): this book reminds us to look at cereal as culture. Toucan Sam (who was quite a linguist, you know, speaking pig latin, talking of his "ove-lay" for "oot-fray oops-lay") would probably be very proud.

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