Apparently Cascadian Farm is a real farm, but I refuse to learn anything about it. Instead, I want to preserve my fantastical mental image of Cascadian Farm as a quaint rural community where busier General Mills cereals like Cinnamon Toast Crunch and Golden Grahams go to escape the city’s sugar-addled hustle and bustle, settle down, and become tamer versions of themselves, with no-nonsense names like Cinnamon Crunch and Graham Crunch.

Yes, the Cascadian Farm of my imagination is pretty much a breakfast parody of Harvest Moon, and I’d like to keep it that way.

Now the newest citizen in Cascadian Farm’s Wholesome Good-Time Barnyard Bayou (my mental name, not theirs) isn’t a direct derivation of another General Mills product. But it does remind me of Kashi’s recent Plant Power Vanilla Pepita Clusters, which is why I took note and lovingly planted Vanilla Chia Crunch into my grocery store cart like a transplanted chia plant. I just wrote the word plant in that sentence more times than I have cumulatively since 2008.

Kashi’s take on vanilla ‘n’ seeds tasted like cupcake-frosted popcorn. Let’s see if the Animal Crossing of cereal brands can be just as memorable.

In an era of multi-clustered cereal flavor cocktails and complexly floured cereals that somehow reconstitute burrito ingredients into sweetened flakes, Vanilla Chia Crunch keeps it refreshingly simple: vanilla seed flakes, oat & honey clusters, and nothing else. Except for maybe a can-do spirit, but until they make optimism taste like maple syrup, that doesn’t count.

But this simplicity is ultimately its downfall, because the plain Jane flakes immediately make me yawn Dawn. There’s a leading flavor that some could call “vanilla” in the bean-y sense of the word, but I prefer to use it in the ordinary/standard/type-of-person-who-considers-vanilla-their-favorite-ice-cream-flavor sense of the word. It tastes less like delightful French vanilla and more like diluted cake icing: generically sweet with traces of powdered sugar.

“More like ick-ing, am I right, folks?” I say aloud before playing the Seinfeld theme song to my empty apartment.

Of course, this barely matters anyway, because the flakes’ vanilla opener quickly fades into a cosmic blandness best described as “fortified cardboard.” They may lack the bitter seediness that ruins most chia-flavored cereals, but Vanilla Chia Crunch flakes lack just about everything else, too, leaving flavorless visions of tofu, porridge, and rice cakes dancing depressingly in my head.

I held out a lot of hope that the clusters would salvage these sugar-dusted packing peanut shards, but their honey-oat taste just isn’t potent enough to break through the flakes’ flavor-sucking tameness. On their own, the pleasantly crunchy clusters twinkle with real floral honey flavor, savory toasted oats, and a dash of vanilla bean flavor of their own, but mixed with the flakes, it tastes at best like whole grain Birthday Cake Teddy Grahams, and at worst like chewing on the cupboard where my grandma stores her cake frosting kit.

I put my last shred of hope into the milk–cereal combo, and while milk didn’t make Vanilla Chia Crunch any better, it certainly made the milk better. See, the milk subtracts what little vanilla flavor the flakes had (though isn’t 0 – 0 still 0?) and it does the same to the clusters, leaving behind a mush of nothingness that stoics, masochists, and Sisyphus alike would applaud.

But even though this leads to many disappointing spoonfuls, the endmilk is made delightfully vannila-ful, as it tastes a bit like funfetti in liquid form. Is this worth buying the whole box for? Certainly not—I can’t really recommend Vanilla Chia Crunch, since Vanilla Pepita does the whole “sweet plants” schtick a lot better, but if you insist on trying this cereal, I recommend pouring a half gallon of milk straight into the bag, steeping for 10 minutes, and siphoning it out to donate to nursing homes.

You know, for all those octogenarians who don’t have the teeth to eat their own birthday cake.

The Bowl: Cascadian Farm Vanilla Chia Crunch Cereal

The Breakdown: With almost no flavor outside of vague, Birthday Cake Teddy Graham taste phantoms, Vanilla Chia Crunch can’t really justify its name or its calorie count. But hey, at least its endmilk tastes like the distilled essence of an elementary school birthday treat.

The Bottom Line: 3.5 puréed Doughboys out of 10

(Quick Nutrition Facts: 220 calories, 4 grams of fiber, 8 grams of sugar, and 5 grams of protein per 1 cup serving)