With the end of the semester just around the corner, I figured this would be a fitting week to discuss what people do when they are nearing the end of the components of breakfast soup.  There are underlying behaviors that you may have never thought about before, but I bet you can recall these experiences if you ever eat cereal. I am going to put out a few different scenarios to get you thinking about your habits, and I will also share what I do in each situation!

Scenario 1: When eating your breakfast soup and you have finished all of the cereal, what do you do with the milk?  Do you dump it down the sink, or do you finish it? If you dump it out, do you get rid of it because you do not like milk at all or you do not like the way the cereal alters the flavor of the milk?  If you finish it, do you drink it out of the bowl like a cup, or do you take spoonfuls of it?

Personally, I drink the remaining milk in the bowl.  When I was younger, I always used the bowls with the built-in straw, but now I drink it in the same way that I would drink out of a cup.  I think that it is too messy and inefficient to drink it by the spoonful!  However, if I am a hotel buffet or somebody’s house and they don’t have skim milk, I do not drink the milk that I used, and I throw it out instead.

Scenario 2: When you are preparing a bowl of cereal and you notice that it is near the end of the box, do you finish the remaining contents and then open a new box, or do you neglect the bottom of the box and open a new one right away?  If you neglect the bottom of the box, do you throw it out, or do you put it back in the pantry for somebody else to encounter?

When I come across the final remnants of the cereal box, I use it!  Believe it or not, I think the cereal at the bottom is packed with flavor because it’s a layer of finely ground pieces of flavor that have rubbed off the bigger pieces in the box.

Scenario 3: When you are pouring the milk and there is not much milk remaining in the container, do you leave the bare minimum amount of milk and put it back in the refrigerator so you do not have to replace it?  Or, do you finish it and get a fresh gallon for the next person so that they are not subjected to the irritation of the essentially empty container of milk?

While I wish I could say that I always get a fresh gallon of milk since that is the right thing to do, my approach to this one honestly depends on the temperature.  Although it is very easy to just walk to the garage and grab a new gallon of milk, I dread walking in the garage on a cold day; the walk to the garage refrigerator on a cold day seems like a trek through the snow.  However, that is over dramatic and a poor reason not to replace the milk, so from here on out, I will always replace the gallon.

As this semester of blogging comes to an end, I hope this week’s post has been thought-provoking!  I hope you have been intrigued with thinking about various subconscious behavioral practices that arise when you reach the end of your bowl of cereal, cereal box, and container of milk.