The Surprising History of Corn Flakes

Lust, betrayal, and sugar.... There's a lot you may not know about your breakfast cereal.

Transcript

00:00All American Kellogg's Cornflakes

00:30These Seventh-day Adventists had become convinced that the U.S. had become morally corrupt and

00:41that the best way to actually cure people of that corruption was to feed them, among

00:47other things, bland foods.

01:01They were asking their followers to do naked calisthenics, they were giving people enemas,

01:05they were giving them these really bland diets, and again, all of it was to take away these

01:09really sort of carnal impulses, which included masturbation.

01:37John Harvey Kellogg was something of an ideologue, he really believed that he was saving people's

01:43souls.

01:44And his brother, Will Keith Kellogg, had a totally different mindset, and he actually

01:48resented his brother because Will Keith Kellogg, W.K.

01:52Kellogg, actually saw the potential profit here.

01:58It was like the Wild West.

02:04There was a lot of really crazy characters involved with this.

02:09For example, Charles William Post, C.W.

02:13Post, he pretended essentially to be one of Kellogg's followers, to learn about Kellogg's

02:19technology and to learn how to make cereal the way Kellogg did, and he basically just

02:23stole those techniques and started making cereal to make money.

02:53I mean, it's just so funny when you go in the cereal aisle and you look down both sides

03:18and you see hundreds of different varieties, and inside each box really ultimately are

03:25the same ingredients.

03:26Most importantly, it's the marketing.

03:27It's how you sort of wrap it.

03:29Are you going to put an athlete on the cover and signal that it's for young athletic boys?

03:34Are you going to put, you know, a cartoon character and show that it's for little kids?

03:56You might have a tendency to look back at that today and say, boy, those cereal inventors

04:03were nuts.

04:04But even today, we really look at food in this sort of moralistic way.

04:09People apply all kinds of value judgments to what you eat and whether it's good or bad.

04:14We use terms of guilt all the time when we talk about food.

04:17We talk about guilty pleasures.

04:18We talk about cheat days.

04:19This is all really an echo of that initial way of thinking of tying food to morals.