Big Cereal's First Gadfly Dies

Until this week, when it was learned that he died, I had only peripherally heard of Robert B. Choate Jr. And given the surprising relative lack of information about him online, that's probably true of most people.

New York Times obit writer Douglas Martin did a fine job with the details. Choate was an odd character, and was one of the first people to call out the big cereal companies for their marketing nonsense.

In 1970, the erstwhile engineer told a Senate panel that "most breakfast cereals barely qualify to be called food," in Martin's paraphrase. He called himself a "citizen lobbyist," and told the Senate panel that 40 of the top 60 breakfast cereals so lacked nutritional value, and were so loaded with sugar, that they may as well have been candy bars. (The Times called him a "food lobbyist" in its headline, which is misleading.)

Big Cereal went on the defensive, of course, and tried to paint Choate as a crackpot. They said he had overlooked the nutritional content of the milk that was poured onto cereal—a self-evidently goofy argument—and said that added sugar was needed to get kids to eat cereal.

"We feel Mr. Choate is a very talented individual, particularly if he's digging ditches or building bridges," said a snarky, unidentified cereal executive in an interview with the Christian Science Monitor at the time.

But in the years after his boat-rocking, cereal companies started making more nutritional products, though the ones that contained the emptiest calories continued to sell best.

Choate died at age 84, of a condition that his son said made it impossible for him to swallow. I'm not sure whether there's irony in that or not.