The Best To You Each Morning: The Cereal In America Story

Photo bt Armando Olivo Martín del Campo, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

The inclusion of a bowl of cereal doused with milk in the breakfast ritual as practiced in the West is of relatively recent vintage. It became popular in the early 20th century, and the story of how that came to be is intricately bound up with an American religious denomination that came along in 1863. It’s a story filled with ambition, piety, quirky curiosity, and betrayal.

There’s also a prelude that occurred in the 1880s in a midwestern city in the next state south of Michigan, where Battle Creek, the main scene of our story, is located. Fate intervened, and Columbus, Indiana passed the status of cereal capital to Battle Creek. That footnote in Columbus industrial history does have a tie to that for which Columbus eventually became known, though.

The cereal story actually begins in Vermont in the 1840s. A farmer and lay Baptist minister named William Miller put a peculiar take he had on a particular Bible passage to the test on a hillside and, while his own credibility took a blow, he inadvertently launched a movement within Christianity called Adventism.

Miller was convinced that Daniel 8:14 predicted Christ’s return to this realm in 1844. He persuaded a number of people to join him one night for this cosmic occurrence. The appointed hour came and went. No Christ. The episode is known to historians as The Great Disappointment.

But from The Great Disappointment arose Ellen G. White, whose family had been following Miller for a few years. White claimed to have visions of Christ, Satan, and their respective angels. She led a migration of several fellow Millerites/Adventists to Battle Creek. Around the same time that she co-founded the Seventh Day Adventists, she was instrumental in establishing a sanitarium in Battle Creek where seekers of a healthy diet and lifestyle, primarily members of White’s church, could be among the like-minded.

The sanitarium was run by John Harvey Kellogg from 1876 to 1943. His day job was medicine, but his varied interests led him to be an inventor and businessman. Kellogg spoke often of “the harmony of science and the Bible.” He also had some unfortunate views on the subject of eugenics.

Kellogg and the Seventh day Adventists had an irreconcilable set of differences in the early 20th century, leading to his being “disfellowshipped,” essentially excommunicated. A fire destroyed the original sanitarium building, but Kellogg replaced it with his own money. Over the years, sanitarium guests included Thomas Edison, Johnny Weissmuller and George Bernard Shaw.

In 1896, he’d received a patent for corn flakes. He’d been looking into the possibilities for toasted wet-and-dried-again grain since the 1870s.

His brother, Will Keith Kellogg, had been part of the development process. Those Kellogg boys were a contentious pair, and they eventually parted ways. Will founded the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company.

A sanitarium guest, C.W. Post, figures into the story at this juncture. He’d come to the facility after two mental breakdowns brought on by the stress of occupations he’d pursued thus far in life: farm-implement manufacturing and real estate development. Post was a jerk as a husband. His devoted wife, Ella, devoted her life to him, and got an ever-more distant husband for her trouble. Post finally found up leaving Ella and marrying his 27-year-old secretary in 1904. He and his daughter by Ella, Marjorie, remained close, however.

Post was interested in digestion, which led to his being attracted to what the Kellogg brothers had been exploring. In 1897, Post commercially produced Grape Nuts. More cereals followed, and Post became a wealthy man. He began to be beleaguered by abdominal pains, however, and in 1914, he took his life with a gun in his home in Santa Barbara California.

As to the prelude to the story, let’s go back to either 1884 or 1887. A worker named James Vannoy at a Columbus, Indiana mill perfected his experiments with processing milled grain to make it come out in sheets or flakes. He approached his boss, Joseph F. Gent, who brushed him off with a remark about how Vannoy needed to focus his attention on what he was getting paid for. It wasn’t long, however, before Gent applied for a patent on Vannoy’s idea and started mass producing Cerealine.

The company was sold to an Indianapolis mill in 1892, and eventually folded into a much larger concern. No one followed up on the cereal venture and Columbus ceded the crown in that field to Battle Creek.

But one bit of legacy was around to figure in, however peripherally, to what Columbus wound up being known for. The Cerealine building is now where corporate dining and other executive functions take place in Cummins world headquarters. Cummins, founded in Columbus in 1919, ranks 185 in the Fortune 200. Its products fall under the broad classification of power generation. Its best-known product is Diesel engines.

it’s only fitting that breakfast cereal would be a heartland contribution to American culture. It’s a classic story of taking the region’s raw material, grain, and refining it with the new industrial processes changing the landscape, thereby creating entrepreneurial success.

Fallen creatures that human beings are, such a story is not going to be without its elements of rancor and selfishness. Any thread in the national fabric is a little rough.