Weetabix Woke Up and Chose Violence

Delicate wholewheat rusks, topped with haricots enrobed in a silken, sweet tomato sauce. To quote one anonymous food hypebeast, “breakfast ribollita.”

Baked beans on Weetabix.

The food brands are back on their bullshit, and cereal manufacturer Weetabix is leading the way alongside can magnate Heinz. In a tweet posted on 9 February, it wrote: “Why should bread have all the fun, when there’s Weetabix? Serving up @HeinzUK Beanz on bix for breakfast with a twist. #ItHasToBeHeinz #HaveYouHadYourWeetabix.”

Close textural analysis of this dish shows that it is irredeemable. The beans are not soft enough to become mush and the tomato sauce is on the gloopy side. There will not be sufficient hydration of the Weetabix for the constituent parts to achieve any kind of textural interplay, instead leaving gloop, pellet-like beans, and shards of arid wheat dust that crunch into sawdust in the mouth. Any warming of the beans — or, even worse, cooking of the Weetabix in the beans — would simply create a new organic building material for 2021. It does not have to be Heinz, and you do not have to have this Weetabix.

To the untrained eye, this looks like coronavirus pandemic food content par excellence: an unholy alliance of sponsored store cupboard staples, a nod to the proliferation of food-as-absurdity memes from 2020 like everything is cake and the sack of wet eggs. But in fact, this post is a sign that nature is healing, and the food brands are back to ruining Twitter with their stunts, to a chorus of blue-ticked replies from the likes of Lidl (which sells them both), Goodfella’s (it’s food), Virgin Atlantic (ummm), and Specsavers (please, please.) This particular stunt is also primed for two waves of outrage discourse; first, Brits furious at the combination of beans and cereal, and second, Americans using the combination of beans and cereal to spark the 145th Anglo-American Online Food War. Weetabix has its own solution to the COVID-19 crisis: it’s just tweeting through it.