Home News World Why were Cornflakes Invented

Why were Cornflakes Invented

1281
0

Why were cornflakes invented : The preferred response to the inquiry “What’s for breakfast?” in the 1850s was “Everything.”

Dr. John Harvey Kellogg’s Surprising Reason for Inventing Corn Flakes

An Englishman writing home at the time remarked on the large breakfasts served at hotels. Breads, pastries, pancakes, fritters, boiled fowl, cold cuts, and beef steaks were among the options.

Not every American could afford to dine lavishly, but those that could opted for hearty, meat-heavy meals. “

A decent nineteenth-century middle-class breakfast was increasingly considered inadequate without hot beefsteak,” Abigail Carroll writes in Three Square Meals.

As Americans overate breakfast, they developed indigestion and a desire for lighter cuisine, resulting in the emergence of America’s first health food: cereal.

Cereal would make fortunes and give birth to international corporations that we are still familiar with today.

Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, the developer of corn flakes, on the other hand, was unconcerned with revenues. Cereal was not merely a healthy food for him because it would help Americans digest their diet.

He felt that a diet consisting primarily of bland foods such as cereal would keep Americans away from sin. Masturbation is a particularly specific sin.

The development of corn flakes was part of Dr. John Harvey Kellogg’s health crusade, which he called “biological living.”

A countrywide case of digestion prompted Dr. Kellogg’s health movement. “Flesh, meat, meat,” they said.

Potatoes, too. “And cake and pie,” Lowell Dyson writes about 19th-century American eating choices. ” This was true for both breakfast and dinner. Steak and pie could be dinner or breakfast for the wealthy.

The consequences on the nation’s health were disastrous. There was a lot of indigestion.

Americans named this indigestion “dyspepsia,” according to Abigail Carroll, author of Three Square Meals.

Dyspepsia discussions were like today’s obesity debates in that they were continually written about in periodicals and newspapers.

The remedy, according to a number of health reformers, was to make simpler foods. Sylvester Graham, a food reformer, introduced the graham cracker in 1827.

In 1863, a health resort owner named James Caleb Jackson produced the first cereal, which he termed “granula.”

Dr. John Harvey Kellogg also maintained a health resort, where he used revolutionary ideas including “hydrotherapy” to treat diseases and ailments (essentially baths at different temperatures).

Dr. Kellogg was a vegetarian who developed or produced delicacies for his patients, including peanut butter and meatless meats, with the help of his brother William Kellogg.

His greatest enduring contribution was corn flakes, which he first invented in the 1890s.

Kellogg’s corn flakes and Jackson’s granula are no longer popular. They had no extra tastes or sweetness, and they were so hard that they fractured people’s teeth.

People in the 1900s, on the other hand, were desperate for cereal and bought as much as Dr. Kellogg’s health centre could create. It was an occasion for Dr. Kellogg to preach his biologic lifestyle gospel.

John Harvey Kellogg demonstrated the benefits of bland foods like cereal in dense books and popular lectures.

“It is no wonder that the human gastric machine has broken down, and that dyspepsia, constipation, and peristaltic woes of various descriptions have become universal in civilised lands,” he concluded, referring to Americans’ tendency to eat “with the feeble stomach of a primate” seemingly every kind of food, including new, “artificial foods.

Dr. Kellogg advocated for greater exercise, bathing, and eating whole grains rather than meat under his “biologic living” philosophy.

He characterised it as a scientific return to natural principles, similar to today’s paleo or organic diet fads. “To eat biologically is simply to eat scientifically, to eat normally,” he explained.

He also felt, contrary to current eating trends, that man’s modern diets lead to carnal sins.

“Highly seasoned [meats], exciting sauces… and delicate nibbles in infinite variety upset [the] nerves and… react upon the sexual organs,” Kellogg wrote.

Dr. Kellogg wrote about the dangers of sex and masturbation just as much as he did on living a healthy lifestyle.

Cereal served as a stopgap, a dietary treatment to keep Americans from succumbing to sin.

Despite the fact that his product, corn flakes, started a food fad, Dr. Kellogg was more concerned with the cause than with the revenues.

He demonstrated how to make cereal at home in his lectures.

He informed folks, “I’m not after the business.” “I’m looking for reform.”

Cereal’s Ascension

Dr. John Harvey Kellogg’s cereal company quickly outgrew him.

Despite Dr. Kellogg’s efforts to secure a patent for his innovation, businesspeople rapidly learned that they could create cereal without infringing on it.

Hundreds of businesses sprouted near Kellogg’s Michigan medical centre, a fact that Dr. Kellogg took very seriously.

After all, one of the world’s most successful cereal companies was started by a former patient, and the other by Dr. Kellogg’s brother William.

C.W. Post, a former patient, invented and distributed Grape Nuts, and William Kellogg formed the Kellogg Company.

They were successful by introducing sugar, which Dr. Kellogg loathed. Dr. Kellogg and William Kellogg had been at odds over the idea for a long time.

Dr. Kellogg considered sugar as contaminating his health food, whereas William believed they needed to improve the taste of corn flakes

. By the 1940s, however, all of the major cereal manufacturers had sugar pre-coated their products.

Cereal’s other success factor has nothing to do with health.

It was the ultimate convenience food, and as Abigail Carroll, author of Three Square Meals, points out, this appealed to people all across the world as the Industrial Revolution drove more and more people away from fields and into the workforce.

Cereal and “ready to eat” meals appealed to them because they had less time and access to a kitchen.

Cereal had a significant impact on the food business. C.W. Post and William Kellogg were advertising pioneers, spending unheard-of sums to promote their cereal lines and developing some of the first cartoon mascots for them.

C.W. Post had a net worth of roughly $800 million when he died (in 2016 USD).

Dr. Kellogg’s motivations have not changed. Health practises like the organic movement and paleo dieting, which are in many ways a reaction to the manufactured food market that cereal helped to establish, reflect his concept of biologic life.

Thankfully, Dr. Kellogg’s beliefs on how diet affects our sexual lives haven’t resurfaced.