If we are what we eat, a significant degree of who we are—at least, in this country—is cereal. In America, cereal is the most popular breakfast food and the third most popular product in the supermarket altogether—after only soda and cereal’s constant counterpart, milk. In The Land of a Million Cereals, Ryan Alexiev explored this centrality of cereal to our constitution; but cereal, for Alexiev, functioned as more than merely foodstuff. His engagement with cereal was informed by his appreciation of its history and continuing importance as a paradigmatic consumer product. Since the advent of cereal in the early Twentieth Century, the four basic grains—wheat, corn, rice, and oats—have been packaged and promoted in a seemingly endless variety of products. Currently, there are 400 different kinds of cereals on the market, which ultimately are distinguished by little more than their ad campaigns. The substance of cereal is, in this light, ideology. And, when we consume it, we ingest more than merely calories. We literally incorporate a sense of who we are—not only through our identification with an image on the face of a cardboard box, but furthermore, for Alexiev, as rational subjects who imagine ourselves as free to choose.

Alexiev examined this ideology of free choice in American consumer culture, so vividly manifested in cereal, by presenting it from the vantage of a Bulgarian peasant. Drawing upon the history of his own family, he told the story of a rustic who flees Communist oppression and comes to America: The Land of a Million Cereals. As if viewed through the eyes of this Second-World son of the soil, the works in the show exaggerate the aesthetics of cereal and its packaging. Everything is ecstatic: promising total, immediate, gratification in a pallet of fluorescent pinks, yellows, and blues, and-perhaps most importantly-an endless variety of what ultimately amounts to nothing but more of the same thing.

The show included prints, sculpture, video, and drawings. And Alexiev, in the role of the peasant, does battle with Frankenberry, who wields the powerful “golden spoon,”—free in every box!