Cereal Dating

ED: You can’t have a show about nutrition without thinking about the most important meal of the day.

PETER: Yeah.

ED: And you know what we’re talking about? Breakfast.

PETER: I think you’re right. That’s what I get up for every morning. If it weren’t the spur of a delicious cereal–

ED: Bowl of Raisin Bran.

PETER: Yeah!

ED: I know what you eat.

PETER: And cereal is what we think of when we think of breakfast. Do you think that was true back at Plymouth Rock?

[LAUGHTER]

We wanted to investigate this question, so we’ve invited our producer, Andrew Parsons, to join us in the studio to talk about the history of cereal.

BRIAN: Yeah did you invite him to bring in that big bottle of milk, also, Peter?

PETER: I’m sorry about the milk.

BRIAN: You know that I’m lactose intolerant. Andrew, here’s my seat, it’s all yours.

PETER: So we got an empty seat, let’s talk cereal.

ANDREW PARSONS: Hey, Peter.

PETER: How you doing?

ANDREW PARSONS: How are you doing?

PETER: Great.

ANDREW PARSONS: So yeah, I did a little research into the history of cereal. And it’s one that’s sort of wrapped up in some chicanery and lawsuits and a little bit of quackery, and I have several cereals here to show you.

ED: You mean real cereals?

ANDREW PARSONS: Yeah, we’re going to eat in the studio.

BRIAN: Oooh, wow, I thought that was against the rules.

ANDREW PARSONS: But before we do that, we should probably talk about what breakfast was like pre-cereal.

PETER: You mean there was a pre-cereal era?

ANDREW PARSONS: Oh yes, oh yes, and we have to go all the way back to the mid 19th century where we have some greasy, greasy breakfasts. In fact, I talked to cereal historian, Topher Ellis, who pretty much described it this way.

TOPHER ELLIS: Pork, fried pork, bacon, steak, really heavy meats, fish, cheese, bread, jams, basically the whole diet was more of a heavy set, very gut wrenching pile of– your fried pork, your fried skins, things like that.

ANDREW PARSONS: Yeah and a lot of the things that Topher listed would all be on one plate. I mean, you’d have four greasy meats together with your eggs and toast.

PETER: They didn’t worry about presentation.

[LAUGHTER]

ANDREW PARSONS: It’s much like that, just giant piles. And this was a problem because you’re going from– you have this sort of farm breakfast and throughout the Industrial Revolution, you’re going to factories, and–

ED: And offices.

ANDREW PARSONS: And office’s too. And you’re not working off all of this heavy, heavy stuff that you’re eating.

ED: Yeah. So people get heavier and heavier, but they also start feeling worse and worse.

PETER: Yeah.

ANDREW PARSONS: There’s even a term for it, it’s called dyspepsia. It’s sort of this vague, sort of national tummy ache, but also–

ED: Mass indigestion.

ANDREW PARSONS: Its mass indigestion, exactly.

PETER: Really, tell us your state of mind. It goes right up to the head, doesn’t it?

ANDREW PARSONS: It does go right up to the head because it supposedly affects the way we act. And so the solution for it is these, as we heard with Sylvester Graham, it’s religious reformers who try to sort of solve this problem.

ED: Save your soul through your stomach, in some ways, right?

ANDREW PARSONS: Exactly.

PETER: Otherwise known as pig.

ANDREW PARSONS: The first crack at it is in 1863. I did a little research, it may not be exactly the way it was made, but I cooked up some, some was called grainula.

PETER: Grainula. Is it crunchy gran– Eww.

ANDREW PARSONS: Well the first thing I want you guys to do is sort of feel the texture.

ED: Or let’s just look at it. You’re feeding us dog food.

PETER: What it looks like is– I don’t know, maybe lava bits? But it’s brown. I mean– what does it taste like?

ANDREW PARSONS: It tastes a little bit like brown lava.

[LAUGHTER] Yeah, well it’s not meant to be good.

PETER: That’s one of the selling points, isn’t it? It’s exceeded them.

ANDREW PARSONS: Yeah exactly. It’s these bricks of sort of dense wheat that’s baked and then broken up and then baked again, so that it’s basically these little chunks of inevitable terribleness.

PETER: It’s like re-bricked, one bricking wasn’t enough.

ANDREW PARSONS: The fact that you guys can eat it probably means I didn’t do it right because it was so hard and so tough to get through, that they had to soak it overnight in milk just to have it be edible. So yeah, this was sold out of what was called sanitariums.

ED: That sounds so delicious, just the sanitariums.

ANDREW PARSONS: Not to be confused with sanatoriums.

ED: Oh.

ANDREW PARSONS: Sanitarians are these sort of cleansing houses. And it was sold to patients to sort of get cured of dyspepsia. And a lot of reformers did. Another one that you might know was this guy. I’m going to give you a bowl and let me see if you can guess the last name of the person.

ED: OK. I’m wondering if it’s Chalkula?

I still haven’t got rid of that last stuff, man. Oh, this looks better. Oh it’s a nicer color. Ed, you’re going to like this. You’re even going to recognize it. It’s like a flake.

ANDREW PARSONS: What name do you associate with that?

ED: Kellogg’s. I’m guessing Battle Creek, Michigan.

ANDREW PARSONS: Battle Creek, Michigan, John Harvey Kellogg. He had his own sanitarium.

ED: So much lighter than Granula.

ANDREW PARSONS: Yeah, well it took a while because before corn flakes, he started giving Granula to his patients at his Battle Creek Sanitarium and selling it too before he got sued and he had to change the U to an O and that’s how we get granola.

ED: Wow.

WILLIAM ALCOTT: He had a lot of these interesting ideas about health, especially sex, just like Graham. And on first glance, he kind of does look like a quack. He basically described most of the foods that we think are good now as evil poison, I mean coffee, caffeine, poison. Sugar, poison. Even vinegar, broth, poison. When I talked to cereal historian, Topher Ellis, this is how we basically describes his philosophy.

TOPHER ELLIS: The plainer the better. John Harvey Kellogg was really into making sure your body was cleansed, so whether it was the meal they sent through you, or the milk or water enemas that he would have do up to eight times a day, the idea was to make sure you had a very cleansed body.

ANDREW PARSONS: Yeah that’s right, milk and water enemas. He actually did yogurt enemas as well.

PETER: Please, please, please–

ANDREW PARSONS: Well, you know, those are sort of the same thing as something like the corn flakes. It’s all about cleansing your body. And people flocked to his sanitarium. All the big wigs of the day, Henry Ford, later on Rockefeller, William Howard Taft, our fattest president–

PETER: Well, yeah he needed too.

ANDREW PARSONS: –Went there as well. But there was one other guy who went through there and his name was Post. CW Post.

PETER: Post!

ANDREW PARSONS: Yeah. If that sounds familiar, I have one more cereal to present to you.

PETER: OK.

ED: Oh, you know what this is? I recognize this.

PETER: Grape nuts.

ANDREW PARSONS: Grapenuts.

ED: Grapenuts, which are neither grape nor nuts.

ANDREW PARSONS: No, well that’s the thing that he was a genius with, was marketing. He came up with a couple cereals like grapenuts, which doesn’t, as you said have grape or nuts, but it doesn’t matter, it’s the word associations that are going to make you buy it. You know, Kellog sold his cereal, but he had to mass market it. And when I talked to Topher Ellis, he noted that in the late 19th century, health was going from fringe to pretty mainstream.

TOPHER ELLIS: Every one was claiming that everything had health properties, but Post was just brilliant at marketing, advertising, was trying different things that just really worked. For example, his Postum hot cereal drink claimed it could take care of everything from I guess gout to divorce to a house fire.

ANDREW PARSONS: He didn’t actually say it could take care of a house fire, that’s a little bit of an exaggeration, but–

ED: Did he say divorce?

ANDREW PARSONS: Well, what he did say was–

PETER: I think these are grounds for divorce.

ANDREW PARSONS: But he did say it could prevent blindness, that it could cure appendicitis. That’s when the real cereal wars started.

PETER: When are we talking about?

ANDREW PARSONS: We’re talking the 1890s.

PETER: So this happened pretty quickly then.

ANDREW PARSONS: Yeah, it happened very quickly. By the 1890s, Kellogg was just furious because he knew that Post was just pretty much kind of cleverly lying to people, but he also knew that people were buying this stuff, so pretty soon he had his version of Grapenuts called Grandnuts.

[LAUGHTER]

And very quickly Post realized that he could have a cornflake too, he called it Elijah’s Manna, because people seemed to be really–

PETER: Called it what?

WILLIAM ALCOTT: Elijah’s Manna. Because people seemed to be really big into religious stuff. They might buy that. Post would steal from Kellogg, Kellogg would steal from Post, by 1911 you have, what, 107 different types of corn flakes being made out of Battle Creek alone. And what is interesting about that large market, it’s sort of really hard, as hard to wade through then as it is now. I mean, sort of the snake oiling of this is going to cure everything.

Even in 2009, the FDA had to send a letter to General Mills because their heart healthy campaign on Cheerios so forcefully said that it would lower your cholesterol that they said advertising for Cheerios basically classified it as an unauthorized drug.

PETER: But that’s the appeal to that old notion that this is a healthy breakfast, a good way to start your day. It’s old fashioned.

ED: It’s interesting how the very boxes that you brought into the studio, Andrew, really tell the story, the history that you’re introducing here. So I’m looking at Grapenuts. And of course what does it say at the bottom, the original cereal.

PETER: This is, as in Kellogg’s cornflakes, it’s the goodness of a simple grain. Guess what, they’ve been delivering this, the original and the best, since 1906.

ANDREW PARSONS: Which a little bit later than you would think since John Harvey Kellogg invented it–

PETER: Yeah, tell us about that–

ANDREW PARSONS: –In the late 1800s. But even, it’s his brother, Will Kellogg, that decided that you don’t know how to market this, I do. Will Kellogg decides to sort of buyout his share of the company, add a little sugar, add some of that stuff that people are craving that Kellogg never wanted to put in, and the corn flakes that you’re eating is Will Kellogg’s, because he decided to take it to the masses.

ED: And they seem health conscious to us now because they are in distinction against the cereals introduced more recently, right? You go, hey I can have Count Chocula or Captain Crunch, which are basically just fossilized sugar, or I could go back to the original health food of cornflakes.

PETER: Yeah, so cereals will save us from cereals in a way, Andrew, what you’re showing us here is that the repressed returns everything that people would be eating in the olden days is suppressed and you go through this phase of really healthy yucky stuff, but then that taste comes back because you’re pandering to a large market.

ED: It strikes me that the great trajectory of breakfast in America has been from grease to sugar.

PETER: Yeah.

ED: You tell me there’s no such thing as progress.

THE VERVE PIPE: (SINGING) I love my cereal. My cereal. Morning, noon, and night. I love–

MALE SPEAKER: It’s time for another short break. When we get back, we’ll hear why a group of gilded-age performers thought good cooking could prevent class warfare.

PETER: You’re listening to BackStory. We’ll be back in a moment.

THE VERVE PIPE: (SINGING) It could be sugar-coated cornpuffs shaped in a flake. One little handful is all it takes to make me feel good.