Category: food

The other day, at Sam’s Club, I stopped by the juice-and-fruit-based-snacks aisle just to take a look around. I spied some of those milk and cereal bars. I wouldn't want to eat them for breakfast, as they have far too little protein, but I figured that they might work well as snack-alternative to Rice Krispie bars, from time to time. And, compared with Rice Krispie bars, they were fairly similar: about 3g fat and around 100 Calories.

I almost put them into my shopping basket, but then I noticed that they were a General Mills product — and I boycott General Mills products. I’ll explain.

Early last year, Pillsbury sent cease-and-desist letters to Universities and companies as large as Sun Microsystems ordering engineers to stop holding what the company considers illegal “bake-offs.”:

[It’s] not as if the engineers are huddling together around the oven trading stolen recipes — in techie lingo, a “bake-off” is a get-together in which software programmers test their creations against network protocols to see if they will work correctly. Or, as one site put it, these are “events where engineers get together to test their implementations against each other.” No matter: The geeks are infringing on Pillsbury’s “bake-off trademark,” the letters argued. They're causing confusion, sullying the term, trashing the down-home originality that inspired Pillsbury to trademark the phrase back in 1949. [...]

Certainly, Pillsbury was not losing any revenue from a someone’s programming session. And, sending cease-and-desist letters was a rotton thing to do. So, right then-and-there, I decided to boycott Pillsbury. It didn’t seem tough, at first, but it was more extensive than I first realized: General Mills owns Pillsbury, and General Mills also owns many other companies. So, that meant no Yoplait/Columbo, no Cheerios or Lucky Charms, no Better Crocker or Bisquick, and no Green Giant or Old El Paso. But, you know what? I’m sticking with it, and it's not as hard as you might think.

At any rate, I ended up buying some Kellogg’s Nutri-Grain Yogurt bars instead. I don’t expect them to be as healthy as regular yogurt, but they’d only replacing Rice Krispie bars, anyhow.