jjamele calls a bowl full of pencil shavings for breakfast.(Strip Number, Original Publication Date, 18 October 1998)
Panel 1: As Elly joylessly shovels her Good For You breakfast cereal down her gullet, Mike asks her why it is that they cannot have Sugar Soggs for breakfast for a change. Elly chooses to hear him as saying "sugar cereal" because she lives in fear of her mother's disapproval and knows that Marian would call her a negligent parent were she to serve her children something that IS NOT GOOD FOR THEM.
Panel 2: Since she is at pains to never let her children figure out that most of the reason she's a joyless and punitive ogre is that she lives in constant fear of being called a failure as a mother, Elly states that she does not buy sugar cereal because wants her children to have a decent breakfast.
Panel 3: She then tells this horrible boy who hates the love in her heart and wants her to be called cruel and negligent that wants something with substance and with fibre. Mike ain't having any of this pious bullcrap from someone who seems to live to talk down to him.
Panel 4: This failure to understand that she's perceived as a killjoy who lives to see her children suffer is why she's surprised by his comment about eating the box.
Summary: Elly probably still doesn't quite understand that her children saw her as being a joyless figure who wanted to eradicate and destroy a pleasure she feared and hated because she's unable to experience it because she's not smart enough to understand that her fear of laughing or smiling in their presence so as to preserve her authority had a negative consequence.