How modern breakfast cereal was invented

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 they can go out and toil in the fields they need body fuel so in order to cook for them you're gonna have to wake up at least an hour before they do it's gonna be pitch black and it's gonna be cold by candlelight 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 two 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 flower 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 over stimulating 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 markle at the university of michigan in the late 1870s kellogg was serving his patients a kind of zevi back in the morning zveyback 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 vybeck 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 vyback 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 this vibe 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 calib 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 a 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 mouthful of pebbles modern light and crispy breakfast cereals had yet to be born that would take the kind of industrial ingenuity that also has given us harry's the 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supplies last harrys.com adamar thank you harry's 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 machine 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 gotta do is you gotta dextrinize this you gotta 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 markle 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 gonna 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 you know that'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 like 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 kellogg's 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 temperatures 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 gotta 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 believed that they had struck gold it was will who proceeded to mass market cornflakes 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 fight that ensued i highly recommend howard markle's book here there's a link in the description remember that markle is 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 lightheaded 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 gotta store up fat now for the lean times ahead when there will be no fruit 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

Channel: Adam Ragusea

Views: 458,988

Rating: 4.9482207 out of 5

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Id: m4reqXABLSU

Length: 16min 2sec (962 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 15 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/aperson]

My main takeaway is that /u/handtoolrescue watches Adam and that's a crossover episode I need to see.

Edit:

WTF, the next random video I watch via reddit has handtoolrescue as the top comment too: https://youtu.be/K1ljOcl39PQ