Breakfast as we Americans know it today might
not be the same if not for J. Harvey Kellogg, born 165 years ago this month. Kellogg
was not the first to have the dry cereal idea: the Native Americans introduced
their breakfast of popcorn to the English colonists in the 1600s.
The Michigan-born John Harvey Kellogg was an
M.D., a surgeon a well as a nutritionist, educated at New York University.
Along with his younger brother, Will Keith Kellogg, a businessman and
industrialist, he ran the Battle Creek Sanitarium. The sanitarium, owned by the
Seventh-Day Adventist Church, was a place for patients to regain good health
while learning, according to the church’s tenets, to exercise, eat, and
eliminate properly.
One of the beliefs at the sanatorium was that
bland foods would lower the libido. A regular staple of the breakfast meal, part
of a strict vegetarian diet, was boiled grains. The story goes that one morning
the wheat grains were badly overcooked. What to do? In the spirit of “waste
not, want not,” the brothers decided to dry and roll out the cooked wheat to
make a dough. What they got wasn’t a dough, but flakes – wheat flakes. The
patients liked it. That led to making flakes of corn, and thus corn flakes,
were born. Kellogg’s has become synonymous with corn flakes.
Actually, the first to market corn flakes was
C. W. Post. Post had been a patient at the sanitarium, and he ‘acquired’ the process
and began to make and market flaked corn as Post Toasties. A year later, Will
decided to do the same, and with his brother John, founded the Battle Creek
Toasted Corn Flake Company, later known as just Kellogg’s.
Oatmeal, farina, and such had always been
available, but the dry cereal was less expensive and quicker to get to the
breakfast table. After the advent of the corn flake, grains that were popped,
pulled, puffed, or made into tiny o’s were healthier replacements for the eggs
and meat, and maybe kippers if you were British, often eaten for breakfast.
For most people, on most days, breakfast,
dried or frozen, now comes in a box. Dried cereal, sugared or not, is beginning
to make way for new forms of ready breakfast foods that can be cooked quickly. Pop
Tarts and Eggos aside, and both have been around for over fifty years, the
selections have expanded to include things like breakfast burritos, filled
croissants, stuffed hash browns, French toast sticks, and even steak and eggs.
Corporate test kitchens are working overtime. Breakfast is an important meal,
and it is becoming easier and easier to eat well while on the go.
Both John Harvey Kellogg and his brother Will
died at the age of 91. They must have been eating right for all those years.
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| The All-American artist, Norman Rockwell, did illustrations for the All-American breakfast. |
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