Rice Krispies Lose Pop In Sudden Cereal Sounding-Off
After a real recipe change, Pop reportedly joins a union, demands a tiny hat and refuses to leave the cupboard.
LOWER CRUNCHFORD, The real cereal news is straightforward enough. Rice Krispies and Coco Pops now use rice flour and corn flour rather than rice after weather problems affected grain availability and quality. Then Rice Krispies found that the revised recipe could still snap and crackle. Pop, apparently, had gone missing.
Pop was last seen beside a breakfast bowl, carrying a small suitcase and wearing a union badge. Witnesses described the expression of a sound effect excluded from a meeting. He declined to comment because he is one syllable and therefore legally exhausted.
Merribell Quoin, acting secretary of the Lower Crunchford Cereal Mediation Panel, said Pop had lodged a grievance composed entirely of bubbles. “He wants a chair, a whistle and one afternoon off,” she said, taking a spoon out of the proceedings after it became “visibly crunchy.”
“Every breakfast gets a crunch. Nobody asks what the crunch wants.”
The other noises have formed the Snap, Crackle and Occasional Pop Workers’ Association. It represents sounds made by breakfast foods, cardboard boxes and one disappointed raincoat. The union wants equal access to milk, a ban on children shouting its members’ names, and at least one appearance on the front of the packet.
Clive Spoon, the stainless-steel delegate for utensils with unresolved feelings, said the affair had exposed an old injustice. “Every breakfast gets a crunch,” he said. “Nobody asks what the crunch wants.” He asked for a private room and received the sugar bowl.
The paperwork then made things worse. Form CEREAL-14 began rejecting applications because it “did not feel seen”, while Appendix B went into the corridor and joined the union. The ministry appointed a smaller form to supervise it. That form is thought to be planning a takeover of the stationery cupboard.
By teatime, Snap and Crackle had agreed to work under protest if they received matching scarves and a ceremonial pause before every bowl. Pop remained unavailable and was reportedly attending a conference for abandoned sound effects in a nearby drawer. A man standing nearby said the cereal tasted perfectly normal, though it sounded “like it had been raised by accountants.”