What's in your oatmeal?

Mark Bittman writes about how to make oatmeal wrong:

Like so many other venerable foods, oatmeal has been roundly abused by food marketers for more than 40 years. Take, for example, Quaker Strawberries and Cream Instant Oatmeal, which contains no strawberries, no cream, 12 times the sugars of Quaker Old Fashioned Oats and only half of the fiber. At least it’s inexpensive, less than 50 cents a packet on average. (A serving of cooked rolled oats will set you back half that at most, plus the cost of condiments; of course, it’ll be much better in every respect.)

I wonder where they're buying the oatmeal, or perhaps if buying the name brand is what bumps it up to "less than 50 cents a packet". The last batch I bought was somewhere around 20 cents per packet. Perhaps based on the above I should begin making my own. And maybe one of these days I'll figure out to do the steel-cut variety in a slow cooker - some people seem able to do it but I've generally been more successful at making glue.