The year is 1863. Cheerios won’t be invented for almost 60 years; Lucky Charms won’t emerge for more than a century. But a middle-aged doctor in upstate New York is at work on a snack that will change the American breakfast – and, some might argue, the nation itself – for ever.
Dr James Caleb Jackson, who ran a sanatorium in upstate New York, has invented what he called Granula: a recipe made from water and dried graham flour broken into pieces. The stuff was so hard that it had to be mixed with milk to be edible – and thus breakfast cereal was born.
This year, as Americans coast to coast took to the streets to celebrate the 160th anniversary of flakes in milk, I realized I hardly knew anything about the topic – despite a childhood rich in Honey Nut Cheerios. It was time to get out my spoon and dig into the history of the world’s best food.
Here’s the surprising story of how we got from bland hunks of flour to neon-colored sugar nuggets and back again.
A bland diet to cure the nation’s ills
Like all good stories, the history of cereal begins with an anti-masturbation campaigner.
Jackson’s invention was inspired by his belief that the digestive system was at the root of our health problems. And his invention was soon mimicked by a fellow health champion with a more familiar name: John Harvey Kellogg.
Kellogg, a physician, visited Jackson’s sanatorium and worked for Ellen White, the founder of Seventh-Day Adventism and a patient of Jackson’s. And in the late 19th century, Kellogg ran a celebrated sanatorium of his own, in Battle Creek, Michigan – the “Vatican of the Seventh-Day Adventist church”, according to the historian Howard Markel. Not coincidentally, it’s also the home of the Kellogg’s company to this day.
Kellogg was a member of the church, which promoted wellness and was big on good digestion at a time when many breakfasts involved meat and fried potatoes. He was also extremely worried about masturbation, believing it could lead to a bizarre list of problems from unattractiveness to insanity. He thought a bland diet could help tackle the twin national crises of indigestion and masturbation.
Kellogg came up with his own version of Granula, but a lawsuit from Jackson forced him to cleverly change the name to the unrecognizable “granola”. And along with his younger brother, Will, and perhaps others at the sanatorium, he invented cornflakes. The cereal’s exact origin is murky, but one story goes that when dough was accidentally allowed to ferment, the Kelloggs realized it could be rolled flat and cooked to create crunchy flakes.
The two brothers didn’t get along well, however, and the Lennon and McCartney of breakfast foods parted ways in the early 1900s. Will bought the recipe, added sugar to the flakes and founded the company we know today.
But the Kelloggs’ fraternal feuding wasn’t the only grain-based rivalry in the appropriately named Battle Creek. One of the patients at Kellogg’s sanatorium had a name familiar to any connoisseur of Honey Bunches of Oats: CW Post. The Post cereals’ namesake didn’t have the money to stay in the sanatorium, as Sarah Pruitt writes for History, so he made his way by working in the kitchen, where he was able to observe the cereal-making process. In 1897, he invented Grape-Nuts, in an apparent attempt to out-bland his former employer. (They’re neither grapes nor nuts, and there are several explanations for the name, including that they look like grape seeds.) He also bought the exclusive manufacturing rights to a cereal-making machine Will Kellogg helped invent.
The cereal wars were under way.
An industry takes shape
In the ensuing decades, a series of competitors joined the ring. Wheaties appeared in 1921, also as the result of an accident, when someone made flakes by spilling bran mixture on a stove. In 1927, according to company history, Will Kellogg was charmed by the crackling sound of milk on toasted rice, giving rise to Rice Krispies.
Chex’s origin story is odder. Originally called Shredded Ralston, the cereal hit shelves in the 1930s. It had deep ties to Webster Edgerly, who led a health movement/cult known as Ralstonism – and also believed in eugenics and mind control. Fortunately, Chex are now made by General Mills. So if you eat them, you’re not supporting a deluded racist – just a $39bn corporation.
It wasn’t until the next decade that the world was introduced to the cereal world’s heaviest hitter: Cheerios. Despite their shape, they weren’t initially called “Os” but “Cheerioats”. They were first made in Buffalo, New York, in 1941 and the city still smells like Cheerios. Assessments of the country’s most popular cereal differ, but Cheerios – including its little sibling Honey Nut Cheerios, which appeared in 1979 – are often described as No 1.
Things get sweeter
Then came the sugar and cartoons.
In the 1950s, as Kim Severson writes in the New York Times, “sugar became a selling point”. The proof is in the name: Kellogg’s introduced Sugar Frosted Flakes in 1952, and it kept that name until 1983. Along with fueling the sweetness trend, they helped popularize the idea of the cartoon mascot for cereal. Tony the Italian American tiger may be the best known; according to Kellogg’s, he beat out other potential spokesanimals including Katy the Kangaroo, Elmo the Elephant and Newt the Gnu. There’s also Toucan Sam, who’s been pushing Froot Loops since 1963, Cap’n Horatio Magellan Crunch (real name), who defends his cereal from evil Soggies, and Lucky the Leprechaun, who has clashed with minors over his Lucky Charms since 1964. In 1971, Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble began promoting Fruity and Cocoa Pebbles (the latter of which, cereal connoisseurs confirm, is the single greatest cereal of all time).
It’s all part of a culinary history deeply intertwined with the history of US advertising. It started as far back as Grape-Nuts, which, Severson notes, were the first big product to offer a coupon. Decades later, as Tori Avey writes for PBS, not only did characters appear on cereal boxes – on kids’ TV, “characters frequently gorged themselves on sugary cereals in what amounted to 30-minute infomercials”. From Count Chocula to Cookie Crisp, cereals became staples of the Saturday morning cartoon advertising lineup: kids were the target audience, and sugar was the ingredient of record.
Coming full circle
By the 1990s, it was clear cereal had come a long way. But in the 2000s, as consumers became disappointingly health-conscious as brands like Kashi, Nature’s Path and Sunshine Hill Cardboard Farms* flexed their whole-grain, organic credentials. Which is probably a good thing in the long run – though many such cereals still have high sugar content.
Meanwhile, cereal’s association with childhood comfort has been a mixed blessing. It saw a bump in popularity at the height of Covid, but sales have been declining, and Kellogg’s – which faced a strike last year, accused of offshoring jobs – is even planning to spin off its cereal division into a separate company.
The decline of cereal could be another chapter in its long romance with advertising: TV streaming means we see fewer commercials, and there’s less of an opportunity for brands to get us hooked, as one expert told Refinery29.
But there may still be room for cereal in our hearts, even if there’s less room for sugar in our bloodstreams. Brands like Magic Spoon have tried to re-create a childhood breakfast in sugar-free, gluten-free, adult-friendly form.
I personally am taking a cognitive approach to the carbohydrate crisis. Instead of cutting cereal out entirely, I’m training my brain to see sugary cereals as dessert rather than breakfast, an occasional treat to reward myself for the drudgery of daily oatmeal.
Someday, I hope to be able to say I’m no longer truly cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs – just mildly irrational.
*I made this one up
