My cereal collection, circa 2010.As a restaurant critic, I don’t have a lot of control over what I eat.I know it seems counter-intuitive. As the restaurant guy, I should be able to eat whatever I want whenever I want, right? That should be one of the big perks of this job: the ability–nay, the duty–to shove into my snack-hole any damn fool thing I want at any damn fool time I choose. If I want to eat a pound of foie gras for breakfast, I ought to just be able to do it. And if I want to spend a week on my couch watching old Godzilla movies and eating nothing but sugary breakfast cereal . . .Well, that’s where things kind of fall apart. Because while yes, I could probably eat a pound of foie gras for breakfast (so long as I wrote a blog post about it afterward), that cereal thing? It just wouldn’t work. The hitch in that whole “eat anything, anytime” thing is that I spend most of my mealtimes eating only what other people feel like cooking–often long past the time when I have become uninterested in what they have to offer. I get to eat some of the best food in the city, that’s true. And that’s awesome. But I also have to eat a lot of the worst and the dullest. And in order to do my job right, I have to eat a lot of it.Lunch, dinner, brunch, linner, dunch, second breakfast, fourth meal, midnight snacks and last-call burrito runs–all those meal times are spoken for in my world. Most days, those are dedicated to my explorations of Seattle’s restaurants–to stuffing myself with a thousand different cheeseburgers and infinite versions of the same tuna carpaccio.But breakfast? Unless I am on some kind of weird pancake jag, breakfast is more or less mine. And because I am pretty goddamn lazy in addition to being terminally overfed, breakfast for me generally means something quick, easy, and heavily processed, with very little relation to any actual food found in nature.This means breakfast cereal. And as the picture above shows, I have amassed quite a collection. All of it is interesting. Most of it is junk of the worst kind. In general, it contains more marshmallows than any one man ought to consume in a lifetime. And because my obsession with food runs tandem with my obsession for telling people about every bite of it that passes between my lips, I have decided that all those boxes and all those bowls represent an untapped gold mine of potential criticism. I’m eating this stuff, after all–early in the morning, in the middle of the night, at any hour at which I find myself hungry but unwilling to put on pants, go out and order tacos, dumplings, or pho–so why not write about it?Hence, this new column: a weekly feature in which I will discuss that one food item that almost all of us–the rich ones and the poor ones, the vegans and the carnivores, the chicken and the brave–have in common. Everyone eats cereal, right? In some form or another? From hot oatmeal to Grape Nuts, from congee and muesli to Kaboom (remember Kaboom?) and Apple Jacks (my go-to favorite of all time), breakfast cereal is, in a way, the most democratic of all foods.So every week, I will take on either a single box or an entire category and just talk about it–about the cereal itself, sure, but also the packaging, the history, the greater impact of it in our culture. If you’ve got some cereal that you love, let me know. If there’s some weird-ass off-brand that you really love (or really hate), drop a line and I’ll do my best to find it, eat it, and report on its effects. Nothing is out of bounds here.I am the Cereal Philanderer. Because baby, I got too much love for just one box.