I’m not nuts about the disappearance of ProNutro

I was seven years old when ProNutro was introduced. A new, strange kind of breakfast cereal. Was it porridge? Not quite. Porridge was cooked. Like Jungle Oats, or Maltabella; creamy and steamy, and sweetened with sugar or jam. 

I loved Maltabella, though I tasted it again a few years ago after a 50-year gap and it tasted dreadful. Yet it was the same thing. It must have been my palate that had changed.

ProNutro was strange in another way too. It was just slightly grainy, with a texture that perplexed the little-boy me at first. Did I like it, or not? It took me a few weeks to figure out where I stood on this important matter.

But when I ate it, in great, cold spoonfuls, I found that I wanted more and more. Apparently it can be eaten warm, but that’s a terrible idea. I’d devour a bowl of it in a minute. It tasted of nutrition and energy, and I went on to enjoy bowls of ProNutro for breakfast throughout my boyhood. My dad said it tasted like milky, sweetened sawdust.

Now, as my colleague Stephen Grootes has reminded us in his latest After the Bell column, ProNutro is no more, and there are no reasons for this that an average intellect can quite comprehend. Something to do with some or other “roller drum drying process”, which doesn’t sound impossible to fix, surely.

Apparently they changed the recipe for ProNutro. Consumers didn’t like it. Instead of throwing in the towel, they could have put some resources into fixing the problem they created.

Funny how we respond to these things, right? When we had to endure The Great Fish Paste Scandal a few years back, thousands of people who hadn’t tasted fish paste in two years were suddenly desperate to get hold of some. Many others, who had consumed it every day on their toast, went full cold turkey, vowing to inject diluted fish paste into their veins if they could find some.

We made our own fish paste, stole it from our friends’ pantry shelves, and if we found jars of it in some small-town backstreet shop, we bought it all up and hid it in the attic when we got home.

When our friends asked, “You wouldn’t have a jar or two of fish paste by any chance?”, we’d shame-faced lie. “Me? Fish paste? Why would you think I’d have some of that?” This while trying to avert our eyes from the trapdoor in the ceiling.

It doesn’t look like we could make our own ProNutro, given that “roller drum drying” problem and all. If the manufacturers can’t get it done, what chance for the rest of us?

So, 64 years of our lives with ProNutro, and now we must move on.

Me, I’m still salivating for Grape Nuts, who remembers them? I haven’t seen them on the shelves in South Africa for years, and one of the joys of our four years of living in Chichester two decades ago was being able to buy Post Grape Nuts and have them as a milky breakfast again.

They’re still my favourite, even now. Yet they disappeared from South African supermarket shelves so long ago that nobody remembers.

Even AI and Google don’t remember. They have been singularly unhelpful in tracking down a date, or even an approximate decade, when men in unflattering suits and awkward ties decided we were never to eat Grape Nuts again. Unless we moved to England. Where they are still sold, I checked.

It’s all very unsettling. They can just whip away anything they want to, at any moment, and suddenly we find ourselves waking up to a world without, who knows? Cornflakes? Rice Krispies? Coco Pops?

Is it even worth opening your eyes in the morning and peeping over the edge of the blanket, fearfully, to see whether everything is as it was when we turned the light out last night?

Do the men in unflattering suits and awkward ties not have hearts? Or is there a secret agenda we are not to be apprised of?

Are we all to be murdered in our beds?

Don’t send your answers on a postcard. Nobody’s listening. DM