Whole Grain Wheat Flour, Wheat Flour, Malted Barley Flour, Salt, Dried Yeast.

Some people seek perfection in their mates. Others look for it in nature, or art: this perfect sunset, or that immortal bronze. These people are all barking up the wrong tree. True perfection lies in grape nuts.

Every morning I wake up excited about my day. Is my day really that exciting? Well, no. But by the time I wake up, I'm usually starving. And there is nothing so piquant as lying in bed hungry yet replete with the knowledge that soon as you stop ineffectively mashing the snooze button, you can get up, go downstairs, and down a bowl of grape nuts.

Really I can think of nothing more closely approximating sublimity than the grape nut. It's malty, salty, coy in its denseness yet receptive to the advances of milk. It plays well with others. It resists through yielding, yields through resistance, and tastes, delightfully, of nothing so much as itself.

And of course, like a cherry on top of the world's biggest ice-cream sundae, there's the name. Grape nuts. No grapes, no nuts: just those two little words dangling their denotations like fishing line over the edge of the pier.

Take the bait.