Feb. 02, 2011 - Issue #798 : Communion
Provenance
The history of cereal
Dating back at least three centuries, porridge was the traditional cereal throughout much of Northern Europe and Russia. Barley was the most commonly used grain, supplemented with other grains or yellow peas. Cereal grains were soaked to soften them and make them palatable. Later, simple boiling was preferred, because it did the same thing, but created a warm dish for cold mornings and evenings. Initially, porridge was considered a poor man's food, so it took some time before it became socially acceptable among the elite. Although filling and quite nourishing, this porridge wasn't particularly flavourful, so people added sweeteners, such as brown sugar, honey, or maple syrup.
Breakfast cereals as we know them came into existence in the mid-1860s. Dr James Caleb Jackson ran a sanitarium in New York, where he was concerned that too many of his patients had gastrointestinal problems, due to a lack of fibre. So Jackson came up with "Granula," comprised of dense bran nuggets that had to be soaked overnight in order to be chewable. While he had the right idea, his breakfast remedy was unpopular and not destined to last. One of his patients, however, was a woman named Ellen White, a lady who later moved to Battle Creek, where she went on to form the Seventh Day Adventist religion. One of her church members also ran a sanitarium. His name was John Kellogg.
Kellogg had the same concern for his patients' gastrointestinal disorders. His efforts focused on developing a digestible bread substitute by boiling wheat and rolling it into healthy biscuits. One night in 1894, John Kellogg and his brother, Will, accidentally left a pot of boiled wheat grains standing overnight. When they tried rolling the softened wheat, each grain emerged as a large, thin flake. When dried, these flakes became a tasty cereal. The process worked even better with corn and by 1906, the Kelloggs had founded the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company.
The irony doesn't stop. During this time the Battle Creek Sanitarium had a patient named Charles William Post, who was intrigued by the breakfast cereal he was served. He went on to start his own operation. To start, he improved upon Jackson's failed granula, and created what we know today as Grape-Nuts. Soon after, he created his own brand of corn flakes which he called Post Toasties.
So it was from this one sanitarium in Battle Creek that two food giants emerged, Kellogg's and Post. General Miils, didn't get into the cereal market until much later when, in 1941, it introduced Cheerios. Cheerios were slow to catch on, but once they did there was considerable competition to create a variety of new cereals to satisfy an exploding market which, up to now, had really only had corn flakes. V
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