Athletes aren’t only champions who deserve a seat at breakfast

Wheaties: The breakfast of brainiacs? Two things are happening this month: Those of us with kids have returned them to school, and General Mills is introducing a new variety of Wheaties cereal called Wheaties Fuel, aimed at men.

What do those two things have to do with one another?

Ever since the 1930s, the front of the Wheaties box has featured a parade of notable athletes, from Lou Gehrig to Jesse Owens to Mary Lou Retton to Michael Jordan. Over the decades, the Breakfast of Champions has celebrated achievement on the baseball diamond or in the stadium.

But given that Wheaties sales have been slipping (14 percent over the past year), here’s what I wonder:

Could Wheaties as a brand be reinvigorated if those bright orange boxes started celebrating achievements of the brain as well as the body? Would parents feel better about buying a breakfast cereal that inspired their children to become rocket scientists, disease-battling chemists, or billionaire software designers?

And could we use the Internet and Twitter to persuade General Mills to give this a try?

It is, of course, important to encourage our kids to participate in sports. But the career goal of making a living as a professional athlete is statistically improbable for most of them. Why not present them with other kinds of champions as role models?

I’d like to see a Wheaties box featuring Sally Ride, the first American woman in space (who also happened to be an astrophysicist and a Stanford PhD).

I’d also like to see Internet pioneers Tim Berners-Lee and Vint Cerf; the great primatologist Jane Goodall; the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker; Regina Benjamin, a physician who works in rural Alabama (and who last year won a MacArthur genius grant); robotics pioneer and entrepreneur Helen Greiner; Herbert Boyer, who cofounded Genentech and helped bring the first biotechnology drug to market; and Dean Kamen, a prolific inventor of medical devices and technologies for the developing world (not to mention the Segway scooter).

And what about younger smarties, like the winner of the Scripps National Spelling Bee, the Intel Science Talent Search, or the Lemelson-MIT Prize, or the top student teams in the FIRST Robotics Competition or the Global Green Challenge?

The back of these boxes might explain a little bit about the accomplishments of those featured on the front.

Dean Kamen and Woodie Flowers, the founders of the FIRST Robotics Competition, like to talk about “changing the culture’’ of this country, so that we honor achievements in science, engineering, and technology as often as we honor achievements in sports.

Why not start in the cereal aisle?

From the more than 50 comments:

■Rob Go: Excellent idea, Scott. Reminds me of the “Think Different’ campaign that Apple ran a few years back that featured not just intellectual heroes, but also political figures and civil rights activists. One person I would recommend is Wendy Kopp, founder of Teach for America.

■Krysten: I would definitely be more inclined to buy it! Athletes do not need any more endorsements. Most kids don’t even know what an engineer is, let alone the accomplishments of anyone in particular.

■Geoff Mamlet: It’s a great idea, Scott, but if Wheaties hasn’t been smart enough to figure this out on their own, I hope one of their “trying harder’’ competitors runs with it. There aren’t enough women on this list yet. I’d suggest Admiral Grace Hopper, Rachel Carson, and Margaret Mead.

■Ryan: I know I would rather see my kid aspire to be the next Bill Gates than the next Barry Bonds.

■Pop Warner: I must be the only one in the world that realizes what a stupid idea this is. It’s about what sells. The brand doesn’t impose its beliefs on us, it reflects what we perceive. Commercialized sports are held in very high esteem by the folks that watch ’em. These are the same folks that aspire from their armchairs to be like the athlete. In a nation of overweight blobs of TV fed inertia, I don’t see looking up to an athlete as such an evil thing.

■Greg Zimprich, Director of Brand Public Relations, General Mills (via Twitter): With 80+ yrs featuring athletes, I don’t think we have any plans to change, but we love the Wheaties passion and conversation.