The almost universal hold of breakfast cereal makes a revealing case study of the evolutionary process behind the modern diet. One of the earliest vonvenience foods, processed cereals represents a triumph of marketing, packaging and US economic and foreign policy. They are the epitome of a cheeap commodity converted by manufacturing to higher value goods; of agricultural surplus turned into profitable export. Somehow they have wormed into our confuesd conciousness as intrinsically healthy when, by and largem they are degraded foods that have to have any good ness artificially restored. As someone who has never enjoyed the experience of breakfast cereal – whichever brand it was, the bits always seemed to me to go from dusty to sogggy in the space of a few mouthfuls—I have long been intrigued by how the Bitish breakfast was conquered and what it tells us about the rest of our food. For this is the elephant in the room of coures: it is the industrial processing of food that is the real problem, and to understand where, not me, but rather it, all went wrong, you have to understand the economic and political structures behind today’s food system.