When I’m on vacation, I still like to eat my standard breakfast: oatmeal, lightly sweetened, with hot black coffee.
Why can’t I?
I’m quite serious here. My go-to vacation is Las Vegas (I play Craps three hours each day, I like music, I don’t mind weird people, and an occasional quality beer… it’s perfect.) I used to find a bowl of oatmeal anywhere. Now, not so much. And the quality of the oatmeal I do find is hit or miss.
I must admit that I’m something of an Oatmeal snob. There are several varieties. “Quick” Oats take a minute to cook in boiling water and have a fiber content similar to white bread. It’s awful. “Whole” Oats take a bit longer to cook, are a bit chewier, and have a fiber content similar to that of whole wheat bread. Quick Oats and Whole Oats have similar flavors. “Steel-Cut” Oats are heartier still than Whole Oats, as they are not flakey, but in general they don’t have more fiber content than the whole variety. More exotic varieties of Oats exist, but my snobbery has limits. Let’s just stick with these three, and please understand that I prefer Steel-Cut.
Ideally, restaurants ought to serve Steel-Cut Oats. That’s not usually what I get. When McDonald’s served Oatmeal, it was quick oats with apples and raisins, sweetened beyond my ability to fully enjoy it, but at least it was available and cheap–oatmeal and coffee for $3 or $4. Most coffee shops served Whole Oats, with sugar and fruit on the side and occasionally some milk. I use the past tense in the previous sentence deliberately–that oatmeal (usually $5 to $8 per bowl) is falling off menus quickly. A few restaurants serve better oatmeal: restaurants at high-end casino hotels such as Venetian, an Irish Pub located within Mandalay Bay, specialty joints such as Hash House A-Go-Go… if you want to spend $15 on good Oatmeal, there’s someone to sell it to you. I often need to walk a mile or more to the nearest spot.
What’s wrong with this picture? If Oatmeal is healthy, as most nutritionists assert, and cheap, as a visit to any grocer will show, what do we have to do to get it back on the menu? I suspect more promotion is necessary. When Quaker Oats promoted Oatmeal just about everywhere, there was a downstream effect; diners didn’t know they were getting Quaker, but they asked for Oatmeal anyway. Right now, though, you’re much more likely to find your oats in energy bars–far too sweet for my tastes– than you are hot in a bowl. I’m sure the firms that produce it in this way get great margins.
Absent promotion, what might need to happen to connect diners and households to one of the best breakfasts they can have? I fear the answer is “more inflation, please.” At this writing, one egg costs as much as the oats needed to make a large bowl of Oatmeal. We can’t skip eggs entirely, but we can substitute, correct? Perhaps you hate Oatmeal. Would you hate it with a tablespoon of peanut butter or Nutella mixed in? Or a square of chocolate, half a banana, sliced, and chopped walnuts? Or grape jelly and raisins? Get creative, people. A better, cheaper, breakfast exists–go get it.