Instant God

Given a choice of whipping up some oatmeal for the kids before school — that is, measuring out the oats, boiling the water, waiting for it to cook, cooling it off, serving it with milk — and sliding Kellogg’s “Breakfast Mates,” a cereal with its own milk, bowl, and spoon in front of the kids while you get dressed for work, what would you do? Generally, we prefer the “instant” approach, even in our spirituality.

Oatmeal.

The warm, gooey, breakfast paste that Mom used to make you eat on a cold winter morning before you shuffled off to school. The stuff that sticks to your ribs and stays with you for most of the morning, like wet plaster on lathe.

Some of us remember those days. If Mom was in a good mood, we might get brown sugar to sprinkle over the oatmeal, and she might even let us have a spoonful of vanilla extract to mix in with the mix. Breakfast was an ordeal back in those days.

Not any more. Kellogg and other companies introduced breakfast cereals as an alternative to cooked grains like oatmeal. Of course, you had to sit down at the table, pour the cereal into the bowl, add milk, grab a spoon and eat - and soon this seemed like too much to do. So the American public opted for toaster food like Pop Tarts. But you have to wait for the toaster to warm them up, so we then went to granola bars.

Then Kellogg came up with “Breakfast Mates,” a single portion packaged with its own milk, bowl...