Thankfully, I didn’t experience stomach trouble while under the weather recently, but I didn’t want to push it, so I made sure not to eat any Banana Nut Cheerios. My small intestine rebels at the thought. (Don’t even get me started on the large.) I had one bowl of these orangish-tan circles of artificial flavoring back in December, and that will probably be it. I don’t plan to finish the box. Why is Banana Nut Cheerios a failure? Let’s look back at Cheerios history first.

Cheerios was introduced in 1941, and it immediately became the choice of frazzled airport mothers digging into a grubby Zip-Loc bag for a bland snack that will shut up their crying, mucusy infant. General Mills rode the lucrative gross-baby-who-you-know-will-end-up-sitting-next-to-you-on-the-plane market for four decades before the introduction of Honey Nut Cheerios in 1979.

The product ignited a controversy, not for its content but for its mascot, the Honey Nut Cheerios bee. At that time, news reports stoked fears of killer-bee swarms approaching the United States. These swarms were widely rumored to be trained by special-ops divisions of left-wing South American governments, and thus the Honey Nut Cheerios bee was viewed as tacit encouragement of a new world order. “Honey Nut Cheerios?” said West Virginia senator Jennings Randolph on the Senate floor. “More like Honey Nut Cheery Communists, if you ask me!” But this was not a very catchy slogan at all, so the imbroglio quickly subsided.

Petty red-baiting distracted from the fact that General Mills had blessed our nation with one of the greatest cereals of all time. Honey Nut Cheerios is so, so good to this day. It has even survived a formula change: They don’t use full-fledged nuts anymore but rather almond extract. No matter. This is probably the closest you can get to a “sugar cereal” without passing irrevocably into the tooth-rotting zone, and Honey Nut Cheerios is better than a lot of sugar cereals, anyway.

The reason it’s great is because it works with the milk. A lot of cereals make the mistake of trying to be great on their own. They taste fine straight out of the box. But then they hit the milk and it all goes to hell. Maybe they become too soggy, or maybe they taint their medium with colors or granola mush. Honey Nut Cheerios, though, recognizes that it is one part of a team in the land of milk and honey. So while Honey Nut Cheerios tastes fine dry, when you make a bowl, the milk gives the cereal a magical glaze that brings out another layer of nuttiness. It’s awesome.

Banana Nut Cheerios has the glaze effect, but not much else. The cereal industry has been experimenting with fruit lately, specifically by putting freeze-dried fruit bits in the mix (cf. Honey Bunches of Oats with Strawberries). I don’t like these chunks of astronaut food in my bowl, but the fruity bits have proven very popular, so the cereal makers are taking a new look at what they can do with fruit. Hence Banana Nut Cheerios.

“Banana flavoring” probably raises alarm bells for most of us. It’s a tough flavor to describe, and also a tough flavor to replicate in the lab. Banana flavoring evokes awful banana simulations like the yellow pieces in Runts candy, which taste nothing like banana. Yet General Mills boasts that Banana Nut Cheerios is flavored with nothing artificial. Instead, they use “real bananas and natural banana flavors.”

I don’t know what the difference between those two things is, but the fact that they list both tells you that the following conversation took place at General Mills HQ:

General Mills henchman: Here you are, sir, it’s the Banana Nut Cheerios prototype. It’s flavored exclusively with real bananas.
General Mills middle henchmanager: This tastes terrible. Add some of that fakey “natural” banana crap.
General Mills henchman: Yessir!

The result of the process is a cereal that doesn’t taste like the familiar Runts fake-banana flavor, but still doesn’t taste too much like bananas, either. It tastes like stale bread from a recipe that included ingredients which don’t belong in bread. You know, like when your aunt says, “Here, I got this recipe for boysenberry bread from the health-food store! Try it!” And of course, it tastes wrong because health-food stores are always baking inappropriate crap into bread. (Ironically, banana bread is delicious, but that goes to show how irascible the banana is.

So that’s it. Three new cereals. To recap:

• Honey Kix: Pretty good!
• Cinnamon Chex: Mediocre!
• Banana Nut Cheerios: Bad!

As always, there’s no accounting for taste. Your opinions may differ from mine, in which case you are wrong.