Luxurious Charms

Dear Hipster:

My friends and I were having a very tipsy Fourth of July this year, drinking and playing lawn games as one does on a midweek summer holiday. And, as people tend to do after a few too many cold ones, we outlasted the cookout hotdogs, and so raided my friend’s kitchen for surplus snacks as the sun was setting. Rather than cook anything, we ate our way through an entire, newly opened box of Lucky Charms. No regrets there. While we were demolishing the Lucky Charms, we were talking about how the best part is obviously the marshmallows, which pretty much everybody knows, and one of my friends was saying how every now and again the cereal company releases an “all marshmallows” version of the cereal. This, of course, led to some googling about eating only the marshmallows, and my friends and I drunkenly concluded that if you want to eat only Lucky Charms marshmallows you have basically three options: (1) buy boxes of cereal, pick out all the marshmallows, and discard the rest; (2) buy bulk, dehydrated, Lucky Charms-esque marshmallows for something like $8/pound on Amazon; or (3) buy somebody’s limited edition all-marshmallows giveaway box of cereal on eBay for almost a hundred dollars per pound! For each and every one of these options, I could have said, “Oh, you know there’s some hipster out there who probably thinks that’s a great idea.” I know you have been consulted on some cereal-related issues already a few times this year. At least one of these options is hipster A.F., for sure, but which one?

— Perpetual Cereal Fan

To me, a giant bowl of Lucky Charms marshmallows sounds like exactly the kind of thing you might see from a character in a medium-funny comedy movie who, by sheer dumb luck rather than any kind of skill, invents some software program or novel device, which provides him wealth beyond his wildest dreams. Or maybe he wins the lottery, or inherits the market economy of a small European nation from an estranged uncle. Unfortunately, never having developed anything like social graces, the poor chump can’t think of anything better to do with his billions than sit around in a big, empty mansion watching Simpsons reruns and eating what, to him, counts as the most luxurious food imaginable: the marshmallows from Lucky Charms cereal, liberated from the starchy cereal bits that have always held them back from achieving their true, teeth-rotting potential.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, it sounds insanely delicious, and exactly the kind of thing I might mistake for a killer idea after I’d had 8-too-many Pacificos and sustained a moderately severe sunburn. Are you sure you might not prefer a gluten-free, low-sugar, high-protein artisan keto cereal? Because those exist, although they probably won’t satisfy whatever corner of the human psyche craves sugary snacks in lieu of real food after a hard day’s drunk.

That said, I think it would actually be pretty hipster to spend almost a hundred bones on a box of promotional cereal, eat it, and write a blog excoriating the whole experience as not even remotely worth the exorbitant amount of money you spent on it. I strongly encourage you to do this so I do not have to.