Behold the birth of the modern breakfast cereal industry, or at least this is my
very rough historical reconstruction of the event. It's hard to know exactly what
happened because the people involved grew to absolutely hate each other, and they
naturally left conflicting accounts to posterity. Regardless, this moment in 1894 was momentous.
Prior to the invention of pre-cooked, ready-to-eat cereals, breakfast was a huge pain to make.
Picture it, say you're a typical mom on a family farm in pre-industrial agrarian times.
You need to feed your family something when they wake up so that they can go out and toil in the
fields. They need body fuel. So in order to cook for them, you're going to have to wake up at least
an hour before they do. It's going to be pitch black and it's going to be cold. By candle light,
you get a little coal or wood fire going in your stove, because of course you don't have
electricity yet, then you put some whole or roughly milled grains on the boil, and
it takes at least 45 minutes for them to soften into a porridge that is remotely digestible.
Why not just bake bread? Well, remember traditional yeast breads take hours to
rise. You would work through the night to bake for the morning. There's a reason bakers go to work at
2 in the morning. Chemical leavening agents for quick breads only hit the market in the mid 19th
century, and even then, biscuits or pancakes are still no small deal to make in the morning. You
could bake bread the previous day for the morning, but in the days before chemical dough conditioners
or airtight storage methods, bread went stale really fast. It would be hard by the morning.
Of course, when you live on a farm, the first thing you do when the rooster crows is
milk the cows and collect the chicken eggs. That has to be done first thing,
so in the morning you've got milk and eggs, and if you soak your stale bread in milk and eggs
and then cook it, you've got French toast. People all over the world have had brilliant breakfast
tricks like that for generations, right? But say you didn't have ample access to ham
or salted fish or dairy or eggs. Well, in that situation, a gummy, slow-cooked porridge was still
often going to be your best option. Generally, no staple food was or is cheaper than grain.
Porridge was also going to be your best option if you believed what Dr. John Harvey Kellogg
believed. He believed that modern flour milling practices popularized in the 19th century were
removing much of the nutrition from whole grains, and he was absolutely right about that.
Kellogg also believed that meat and dairy were causing all manner of digestive and other ailments
in people. He was probably right about that too. And Kellogg believed that meat and really any food
that you enjoyed a whole lot was overstimulating — that all manner of bodily pleasures
would drain your body of a finite supply of vital energy that you are born with. And once you are
all out of it, you simply die. He thought the key to longevity was to not enjoy anything.
I'm not sure if he was right about that. But this was the belief system
on which he built his massively popular Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan.
And he constantly tinkered with bland whole grain foods that his patients would be willing and able
to choke down. I'll be referring here primarily to the Battling Brothers of Battle Creek,
this excellent book by physician and historian Howard Markel at the University of Michigan.
In the late 1870s, Kellogg was serving his patients a kind of Zwieback in the morning.
Zwieback is German for twice baked. You bake a loaf, you slice it up, and then you bake it again,
a lot. The English word for this is rusk. Virtually every people on earth developed
some traditional form of this, mostly for the purpose of extending shelf life.
Dehydrated bread won't go moldy as fast. Dr. Kellogg liked Zwieback for a couple of
reasons. One, his patients hated eating it, absolutely hated it. And Kellogg is a guy whose
scientific, medical, and religious philosophy of pleasure denial really quite often crossed the
line into sadism. For a whole video that I made about the philosophical underpinnings of breakfast
cereal, there's a link in the description. Another reason Kellogg liked Zwieback is that
he believed long, high-temperature cooking made the carbohydrates in grains more digestible,
and he wasn't totally wrong about that. Grains are primarily starch. That's what the white
fluffy stuff in there is. Starch molecules are huge glucose polymers — giant chains of glucose
all linked together. Glucose is the sweet sugar on which your body runs,
and when you take in starch, your body has to break it down into individual little glucose
molecules before it can burn them as fuel. Now, a lot of Dr Kellogg's patients at the
Sanitarium in Michigan had terrible digestive problems. That's why they came to him. They
had heartburn, they had constipation, all kinds of bad things, and Kellogg
believed that part of what was going on with them was that their bodies were not able to break more
complex carbohydrates down into simpler sugars that their body could more easily digest.
Kellogg was probably not entirely right about that. But he was definitely right that intense,
dry heat can break starches down into simpler sugars like dextrose, which is a kind of glucose.
And he therefore called this process dextrinization, and it is why a nice
brown roast potato tastes a little sweet, even though the starches in there are too big to link
up with the sweetness receptors on your tongue. Some of those starches on the surface there have
been broken down — effectively pre-digested, which you could argue is what cooking is all about.
Anyway, Kellogg's patients hated the Zwieback. One of them broke her dentures on it. So in 1877,
Kellogg baked a multi-grain dough very hard and brown to dextrinize it, then he ground it
up into breadcrumbs so that it would be easier to chew, and he called these little grains of
grain "granula." Unfortunately, it turned out that a guy in New York state named James Caleb
Jackson had invented a very similar product some years earlier, and he also called it granula.
So Kellogg tweaked his name to "granola" — this is what that evolved into. Though,
it was originally a lot closer to something like Grape Nuts that we have today.
"Grape" in the name refers to grape sugar, which is an old-fashioned name for glucose, which you
get by dextrinizing the grains with very intense cooking. Kellogg did this for digestibility, but a
side effect of baking the crap out of your grains is you dehydrate them, and you deactivate enzymes,
and you certainly destroy any microorganisms. All of this extends shelf life. You get a pre-cooked,
shelf-stable breakfast. John Kellogg's little brother,
Will Kellogg, was the far more sensible and enterprising of the two. He saw the commercial
potential here and he started mass-producing Sanitarium Foods Granola, but it was still like
chewing on a mouth full of pebbles. Modern light and crispy breakfast cereals had yet to be born.
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So while the Kellogg brothers were working on granola, the wheat-based health food fad
reached a lawyer in Denver, Colorado, named Henry Perky. Inspired by his own chronic indigestion,
Perky was doing his own wheat experiments. He boiled some grains and then squeezed them through
a pair of metal rollers with little grooves in them. Little threads came out the other end,
which Perky heaped into pillows and then baked. Shredded wheat. The sugar frosting would come
much later. Problem was Perky did not originally bake them as hard as they are today.
They were still a little soft and wet when he baked them, and as a result,
they were not as crunchy and they got moldy really fast. Perky's original idea therefore was not to
mass-produce the cereal, but to mass-produce the rolling machines so that people can make their own
shredded wheat at home, fresh every day. How fun. So Kellogg eventually caught wind of what Perky
was doing and the two met up and Kellogg said to Perky, "Hey man, what you got to do is you've got
dextrinize this. You've got to bake the crap out of it so that it's more digestible."
Perky did this, which of course also rendered his little biscuits shelf-stable, and yeah,
shredded wheat became a big business, which the Kellogg brothers tried to buy from Perky in 1894.
The historian Howard Markel here is not sure why that deal fell through, but it did. So John and
Will Kellogg set about trying to develop a better version of their own. I mean, I love
shredded wheat, but also, my stress goes right to my jaw. Therefore, I love chewing on really hard,
dense things. Not everybody else does. John Kellogg, Will, and John's wife, Ella here,
all participated in the invention that came next, as did several of their employees. Ella hated
Will, and John and Will came to hate each other. So in their respective versions of this history,
they all minimized each other's contributions and inflated their own. I'm going to circumvent this
whole sticky wicket by simply referring to everyone involved as "they."
They first tried boiling grains, like Henry Perky, did to soften them up,
and then they tried pressing them through a strainer to break them apart into little
pieces to later be baked hard. This did not work — way too sticky. Then they tried rolling
the boiled grain out with a rolling pin. Still pretty sticky, but they scraped up these pieces,
baked them hard, and then they had a proto-flaked cereal.
It's not as bad as it looks. To make production go a little faster,
they then tried passing that boiled grain through a pair of metal rollers, not terribly unlike this
pasta machine that I have here. That too proved to be really tricky. It was just way too sticky — it
was hard to scrape them out from the bottom of the rollers. Then, for some reason, they tried
boiling the grain and then letting it sit for a day. According to one version of the story, it
was because John got called into surgery, so they just had to stop and let the pot sit for a day.
Let's try that. You let that sit overnight and then the next day you have the most disappointing
tray of Rice Krispies Treats ever. I should say, I am not totally sure that this is the substance
that the Kelloggs were working with. They described it as a "dough," and in modern English,
a dough is a thick wet mass made with powdered grains — flour, not whole grains. But as we see
here in the OED, "dough" used to have some broader meanings, and Will Kellogg's account
of what happened next sure suggests to me that they were working with whole boiled grains.
He says they pushed the day-old boiled grain through the rollers and each wheat berry came
out as a perfect, individual flake. That sure sounds like whole boiled grains to me, and as they
sat for a day after they cooked, their moisture content equalized through the whole grain. They
tempered. Also, they got to room temperature, so they cooled down a little bit, and the outside
probably dried out a bit. As a result, everything passed through the rollers much more cleanly.
I think my wheat here is still a little too wet. Does that look like a corn flake to you? Well,
you still got to bake it up hard next, and then you get what a lot of people consider the first
true, modern breakfast cereal: shelf-stable and light, not dense. Crispy rather than crunchy.
Today's manufacturing process for flaked cereal is pretty similar. There's a great
old episode of the TV show How It's Made all about this. It's linked in the description.
Basically they take the grains, they boil or steam them, they mash them up a little bit,
and then they blow-dry them, rapidly dry them, before dropping them through the rollers and then
baking them up crisp. And there you go. John Kellogg believed they'd made a great
contribution to humanity. Will believe that they had struck gold. It was Will
who proceeded to mass-market corn flakes over his older brother's objections. It was Will
who figured out that replacing wheat with corn was both cheaper and tastier, and it was Will
who started mixing in added sugar and salt. John was horrified by this. Remember, his whole
goal was to make the least enjoyable food possible. If you want to know more about
the decades-long legal and personal fights that ensued, I highly recommend Howard Markel's book
here. There's a link in the description. Remember, that Markel was also a physician
and let's end with his assessment of the modern breakfast cereals as a health food.
John Kellogg, for medical reasons, was trying to convert grains into more easily digestible carbs,
but that has turned out to be the least healthy thing about cereal. This stuff is very high on the
glycemic index, meaning that you eat it, your body rapidly converts it into a sudden rush of blood
sugar. This prompts your pancreas to release a ton of this hormone insulin into your bloodstream,
and that facilitates the rapid absorption of that sugar into your cells. This then results
in a blood sugar crash. You go hypoglycemic, you get really cranky, you might even get a little bit
light-headed, and you're super hungry, even though you just ate like an hour ago. And so you eat some
more and then this whole cycle just repeats. This was a good thing in the natural context for
which the human body evolved. Imagine that you and your ancient hunter/gatherer buddies wander into
a wild fruit grove. You shove as much sugary fruit down your gullet as you can.
Your body recognizes this as a rare opportunity to store a bunch of energy, so it converts a
lot of that sugar into body fat, and then it makes you hungry again like an hour later,
so that you will stay in that grove and keep eating the fruit for as long as it lasts.
You got to store up fat now for the lean times ahead, when there will be no fruits to gorge.
It's a totally genius system. Trouble is, thanks to the innovations of agri-industrialists like
Will Kellogg, there are no lean times anymore, at least not for a lot of us in the developed world.
There is always fruit on the branch, and as a result, the quick carb cycle never
stops. It becomes a vicious circle that so many of us struggle every day to escape,
and that may prove to be the Kellogg brothers' most enduring legacy.