The Strange Ingredient Gene Simmons Adds To Cereal

Before the first day of 2020 came to a close, Gene Simmons kicked off the decade by tweeting a question to his followers. What he wanted to know on that late evening in January was whether he was the only person who liked to put ice cubes in their cereal. (Yes, he was posting at night, according to the platform now known as X, but cereal for dinner was a well-established trend by the mid-20-teens so that's not really newsworthy in and of itself.) As the accompanying photos show, Simmons was not only using ice to chill the milk in his bowl, but also, his cereal of choice on that day was Oreo-O's.

Some of Simmons' followers confessed that they too had adopted the cereal-icing habit, while others said they thought they might give it a go now that they knew it was a thing. Still others reacted with shock, although much of this seemed feigned. One person called the concept of ice in cereal "crazy," while someone else suggested that it was "a billion times worse than Ozzy biting the head off that bat." What wasn't clear from the comments is whether people were aware that this isn't just some bizarre celebrity food habit on par with King Charles' morning ritual of eating just one plum out of a pair. Nope, it turns out that putting ice in cereal is neither new nor particularly unusual.

We have no idea who the first person was to add ice to cereal, although we'd hazard a guess the practice postdates both the introduction of ready-to-eat cold cereals (1863) and the addition of ice cube compartments to freezers (the 1920s). What we do know is that the practice was being documented back when social media itself was still in its early years, because in 2011 someone tweeted a photo of a bowl of Chex with milk and what was described as "exactly two ice cubes." By 2015, the trend was so widespread that it was covered by Time and Woman's Day, although the latter found the practice "mind-boggling." So, Gene Simmons wasn't exactly sparking a new debate here.

Anyone else put ice cubes in their cereal? pic.twitter.com/lfvZr5lBjk

— Gene Simmons (@genesimmons) January 2, 2020

One concern with putting ice in cereal, at least according to Time, is that the cereal may become soggy, but that makes little sense when you consider that the cereal is already drowning in milk. Either you eat it quickly or else it dissolves into mush, whether or not there's ice in the bowl. A more valid concern might be the milk becoming watered down, but there's an easy solution. As one commenter on the Simmons tweet noted, you can always just make ice cubes out of milk. A different user, however, advised achieving a similar effect by putting the carton into the freezer for 10 minutes before pouring the milk on the cereal, while a third said that all you really need to do is store your cereal bowl in the freezer.