The power of muesli

Along with quiche, salad and tofu, muesli is frequently portrayed as a food that is inherently effeminate and in some way shameful for real men to eat.

Well, I have been eating muesli for breakfast since the New Year (it’s T-325, in case you regard this as another harbinger of the apocalypse) and let me tell you: in the immortal words of Discharge, muesli ain’t no feeble bastard.

The Full English satisfies more, but it leaves one greasy, crapulent and feeling guilty. Fruit and yoghurt...come on. People only eat that (i) in hotels and (ii) for the sake of appearances.

Muesli alone has the power to keep me from feeling hungry until lunchtime without making me want to go back to bed. It is a freaking miracle food.

So why has it become so closely associated with bed-wetters and Liberal Democrats? Maybe it’s the Swiss thing.

So the story goes, muesli was invented in 1900 by Swiss doctor Maximillian Bircher-Benner to feed to the patients in his hospital, after he had been fed something similar by a mystical mountain-dwelling peasant on a hike in the Alps.

We like to think – don’t we? – of the Swiss as a bunch of effete bankers and diplomats, concerned solely with manufacturing clockwork devices and helping criminals avoid taxation.

And yet, this is a nation of hard-ass do-it-yourself mothers who:

1. Have seen off pretty much every challenger to their political and religious independence (apart from Napoleon) since the 14^th century.
2. Created the first ever democratic multilingual and multiethnic state.
3. Were, for much of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the go-to mercenaries for anyone wanting their enemies crushed underfoot, impaled on sea of pikes or chopped to pieces with a halberd. They were the goddam Chechens of the time.

And look at them now. Sat in the middle of a collapsing Europe, winding their cuckoo clocks, eating their Toblerones and telling the rest of the world it’s too poor to come in.

THAT is the nation that gave the world muesli. So mock my breakfast at your peril.