Celibacy and Cereal: How Religion Changed Breakfast
We all have been told that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Since today is National Cereal Day, you can bet that people everywhere are already celebrating with a bowl of crunchy (probably sweet) cold cereal with milk. Around the world, both children and adults start their day by pouring their first meal from a cardboard box. The average American will consume around 160 bowls a year, and Ireland leads the world in consumption at nearly 18 pounds a person per year.
While cereal consumption has been on the decline for the past few years, both nostalgia and cereal’s long shelf life made demand jump during the pandemic. In spite of the fact that I’ve grown up to be more of a bagel-for-breakfast girl, I still have fond memories of fighting with my siblings for the toy at the bottom of our favorite cereal box (mine was Honeycombs).
While grains have long been consumed as a breakfast food in the form of mush or porridge, ready-to-eat versions like the ones we enjoy today have a much shorter history. An American breakfast in the Victorian era would have looked more like what we visualize as an “English'' breakfast-slabs of ham, eggs, porridge, hot cakes, and even vegetables. In order to understand how we evolved from that to brightly colored boxes filled with toasted grains, we have to go back to the man who changed the breakfast table forever: Dr. John Harvey Kellogg.
John Harvey Kellogg was brought up in the Seventh-Day Adventist faith from a young age. Kellogg believed in the connection between a healthy, “pure” body and spiritual morality. He was able to put his theories to use in 1876 when he was installed as the head of the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan. At “The San,” as it was called, patients were introduced to the joys of enemas, a vegetarian diet, the perils of sex and masturbation…and breakfast cereal.
An early advocate for preventative medicine, Kellogg eschewed the use of the prescribed palliatives of the day and instead promoted a healthy lifestyle regime. To Kellogg, that meant eliminating meat, caffeine, tobacco, sugar, salt, and sex. Not only did Kellogg believe in abstaining from sex, but he also called masturbation “self-pollution” and thought it was the underlying cause of a plethora of physical and moral failures. To combat sexual urges, Kellogg believed that a diet free of “stimulating foods” like spices, sugar, and meat would help the patient avoid arousal. He even went as far as to advocate for male circumcision without anesthetic and desensitizing a woman’s clitoris with carbolic acid. While this staunch opposition to anything sexual may seem archaic, many of his other recommendations were far ahead of his time in terms of how we define health today.
During the time that Kellogg is advocating these changes, the Pure Food and Drug Act is around the corner, but it hasn’t happened yet. That means that there is little (if any) consistent regulation of drugs that are prescribed, how meat is packaged and sold, or the purity of distilled spirits. In an attempt to prove the dangers of eating meat, Kellogg had a steak at a local restaurant tested for harmful bacteria and compared to the bacteria found in manure. The steak contained a higher concentration of harmful bacteria, to the surprise of everyone but Kellogg.
In addition to a healthy diet, Kellogg also emphasized the importance of exercise, fresh air, sunlight, as well as frequent enemas. He was an early advocate of probiotics and even used yogurt as an enema because he thought it would build healthy flora in the gut (definitely a health fad I am glad has fallen out of favor).
We still haven’t gotten to the point of today’s focus: breakfast cereal. See, Kellogg was such a believer in the importance of a healthy gut (he would fit right in with today’s Instagram influencers) that he wanted to ensure his patients at the sanitarium had a morning bowel movement. Here, he got a little help from a guy from New York named James Caleb Jackson, who is arguably the true Father of Breakfast Cereal.
James Caleb Jackson had his own health spa and believed in many of the same things Kellogg does: vegetarianism, no alcohol or tobacco, and a holistic approach to medicine. Jackson comes up with a recipe for a breakfast cereal that uses whole grains and calls it Granula. The problem with Granula was that it was so hard it had to be soaked for at least twenty minutes before it was edible, so Kellogg attempted to improve on the recipe. He created his own cereal but kept the name “granula.” This doesn’t go over so well with Jackson, who sues him for the not-so-subtle rip-off. Kellogg pivoted and renamed the product “granola,” a name that would stick to health foods and health nuts for the next 250 years.
At the San, Kellogg served his breakfast cereal to his patients, as well as sandwiches made with an early prototype of the peanut butter we love as well. Kellogg got help improving his recipes from his brother Will. He employed his younger brother as the manager of the San, but by most accounts, it was not a healthy work relationship. Paid poorly, Will, or W.K. as he was known, was more his brother’s lackey than anything else.
W.K. lived most of his life in his brother’s shadow and probably would have remained there if not for a fortuitous mistake. While working on creating new recipes for their Granola, W.K. left some dough out overnight. Depending on who is telling the story, either W.K., Dr. Kellogg, or his wife, Ella decided to try to roll it out and see if it was still usable. Since the dough had started to ferment, it baked into perfect little flakes, and the forerunner to Corn Flakes was born.
This flaked cereal was a huge hit with the patients at breakfast, and the Kelloggs worked on creating more cereals like it. W.K. pushed to market them to the general public, but he wanted to add something that his brother hated almost as much as sex: sugar. Eventually, the rift between the brothers grew until W.K. packed up and started his own cereal company, and breakfast would never be the same.
W.K. started putting his signature on the boxes of cereal as a recognizable brand and likely to capitalize on his brother’s fame. It worked, and Kellogg’s became a wildly successful breakfast cereal company and made W.K. very wealthy. This provoked the elder Kellogg, who tried multiple times to sue his brother over both the name and the recipes that he used. Dr. Kellogg lost all of the legal battles, and the brothers never reconciled.
So if you are celebrating with cereal, either for breakfast or as a snack, thank the sibling rivalry between two health-conscious brothers and their desire to Make America Poop. Pour some Frosted Flakes, raise a spoon, and thank W.K. for adding sugar and making our childhood sweet.
If you just can’t get enough of the cereal story, check out SYSK and their episode The Kellogg Brothers’ Wacky World of Health, or read John Harvey Kellogg, M.D.: Pioneering Health Reformer by Richard W Schwarz.
