Cap'n Crunch comes from Cedar Rapids

In which I atone for a 25 year old mistake

Not long after Cryptonomicon was published I received an email from a reader in Iowa, written more in sadness than in anger, letting me know that Cap’n Crunch was produced not by General Mills, as I had implied in the text of the book, but by Quaker Oats. As an extra little twist of the knife this reader mentioned that as a person from Iowa I should have known better.

25 years later I came to Cedar Rapids for reasons that are beyond the scope of this Substack, and as a sort of cosmic penance I was given a hotel room with a view over the Quaker Oats cereal processing complex, which is far more colossal than I can do justice to in the above picture.

So this, readers, is actually where Cap’n Crunch comes from. It is the world’s largest cereal plant. According to a seemingly reliable source (waitress in a restaurant with a direct view of the plant) it is recommended to visit on Crunchberry Days. This isn’t a formal holiday as far as I know, it’s just an event that happens a couple of times a year when the factory switches over to the production of Crunchberries and the whole town smells like them.

As long as I’m on a Cedar Rapids Chamber of Commerce kick, I’ll mention that the city is pervaded by rail lines that bring corn in and Cap’n Crunch out of the manufacturing complex. Here’s one in the middle of town with volunteer corn plants presumably growing where kernels jumped off the train, I guess preferring to germinate in the barren soil of a railway siding than end up in a cereal bowl.

The building in the background is the Cedar Rapids Art Museum which has a great collection of Grant Wood paintings many of which pick up on the same theme.