If you go down to the Fuck Parade...
Cereal Killer cafe is not the cause of gentrification, nor can it instigate the solution. Seriously, we just sell breakfast cereal. Not your Aldi own brand rip-offs of Frosties or Shreddies either, we're talking the real deal, imported from all over the world. Pure 100% grade A Strawberry Smiggles, Reese's Type 2 Diabetes Puffs, Hello Kitty Bukkake from Japan, Chairman Mao's Wheat Strips from China, you name it, we can get it. Then we'll lovingly pour it in a porcelain dish with your choice from one of over 20 different varieties of liquid, dozens of toppings, and all at the low, low price of double a whole box of the stuff.
We can't then understand why anyone could possibly object to our little cafe. Cereal selling boutique outlet we may be, but we are also far more than that. We offer an experience you simply can't get anywhere else: breakfast in our eyes is not just the first meal of the day, it's a way of life. Come down to Brick Lane and be transported back to your childhood, where a bowl of heavily processed sugar and chemicals was the be all and end all of existence. The cafe is decorated with cereal memorabilia; what others might call the detritus of marketing past we view as a social history, the story of us, as experienced through the eyes of the Honey Monster. We are extremely serious about breakfast cereal, and we know that many of our customers are as well. We take much influence from the grandfather of breakfast cereals, John Harvey Kellogg, who believed that Corn Flakes could help the fight against masturbation. We credit his thinking for my brother and I's beards, as without the distraction provided by our mission to serve only the finest of the world's maize offerings we would have realised how stupid we look long ago.
Our business is in essence a love letter to the commodifcation of childhood as being a halcyon period of wonder and happiness, as well as our failure to adjust to adulthood beyond the embracing of capitalism at its most decadent. When then a protest terms itself the "Fuck Parade", and yet we did not see any sort of love on display, let alone the promised fucking, only sneering, visceral hate and bullying, we ourselves must object. Those on the protests may have some valid points to make, not that we heard any or would recognise them as such if put to us, but frightening our customers and vandalising our cafe is not the way to go about doing so. Frankly, they're 10 years late in any case: the gentrification boat in Shoreditch has long since sailed. Why don't the organisers move just a little further north and smash the glass of businesses in Hackney itself?
I mean, why us? What is it about two hirsute blokes selling infantile food to other similarly inclined middle class individuals and urban ironists that some middle class people find so terrible? We don't take business from anyone else, as no one before us had quite such a horrific idea, and we in fact bring tourists and rubberneckers into Brick Lane who wouldn't have come otherwise. £4 for a bowl of cereal isn't that bad compared to the price you'll pay for a pint, and we have the same overheads as everyone else. We can't charge someone who doesn't look like our usual clientèle less purely on that basis, on the off chance they might ordinarily get their cereal from a food bank. Why sneer at us when plenty of our critics think nothing of paying £10.00 for a falafel sandwich from Pret a Manger swilled down with the bottled tears of a Syrian child, or £500.00 for a pair of Versace Y-fronts? Why didn't Class War target those conglomerates rather than a small business like ours? It's snobbery, that's what it is.
My brother and I know poverty, having been brought up in Belfast. Our parents scrimped and scraped to buy us Lucky Charms, instilling in us the virtues of hard work and sacrifice. That's what Cereal Killers is about: working hard, playing hard, making life better for everyone. It saddens us that others are too immature, too selfish, too blinded by an ideology motivated by theft and envy to see us for what we really are.
We can't then understand why anyone could possibly object to our little cafe. Cereal selling boutique outlet we may be, but we are also far more than that. We offer an experience you simply can't get anywhere else: breakfast in our eyes is not just the first meal of the day, it's a way of life. Come down to Brick Lane and be transported back to your childhood, where a bowl of heavily processed sugar and chemicals was the be all and end all of existence. The cafe is decorated with cereal memorabilia; what others might call the detritus of marketing past we view as a social history, the story of us, as experienced through the eyes of the Honey Monster. We are extremely serious about breakfast cereal, and we know that many of our customers are as well. We take much influence from the grandfather of breakfast cereals, John Harvey Kellogg, who believed that Corn Flakes could help the fight against masturbation. We credit his thinking for my brother and I's beards, as without the distraction provided by our mission to serve only the finest of the world's maize offerings we would have realised how stupid we look long ago.
Our business is in essence a love letter to the commodifcation of childhood as being a halcyon period of wonder and happiness, as well as our failure to adjust to adulthood beyond the embracing of capitalism at its most decadent. When then a protest terms itself the "Fuck Parade", and yet we did not see any sort of love on display, let alone the promised fucking, only sneering, visceral hate and bullying, we ourselves must object. Those on the protests may have some valid points to make, not that we heard any or would recognise them as such if put to us, but frightening our customers and vandalising our cafe is not the way to go about doing so. Frankly, they're 10 years late in any case: the gentrification boat in Shoreditch has long since sailed. Why don't the organisers move just a little further north and smash the glass of businesses in Hackney itself?
I mean, why us? What is it about two hirsute blokes selling infantile food to other similarly inclined middle class individuals and urban ironists that some middle class people find so terrible? We don't take business from anyone else, as no one before us had quite such a horrific idea, and we in fact bring tourists and rubberneckers into Brick Lane who wouldn't have come otherwise. £4 for a bowl of cereal isn't that bad compared to the price you'll pay for a pint, and we have the same overheads as everyone else. We can't charge someone who doesn't look like our usual clientèle less purely on that basis, on the off chance they might ordinarily get their cereal from a food bank. Why sneer at us when plenty of our critics think nothing of paying £10.00 for a falafel sandwich from Pret a Manger swilled down with the bottled tears of a Syrian child, or £500.00 for a pair of Versace Y-fronts? Why didn't Class War target those conglomerates rather than a small business like ours? It's snobbery, that's what it is.
My brother and I know poverty, having been brought up in Belfast. Our parents scrimped and scraped to buy us Lucky Charms, instilling in us the virtues of hard work and sacrifice. That's what Cereal Killers is about: working hard, playing hard, making life better for everyone. It saddens us that others are too immature, too selfish, too blinded by an ideology motivated by theft and envy to see us for what we really are.
Labels: Cereal Killers, Fuck Parade, mockery, protests, stupidity
| Permalink
Post a Comment