Cooks used foodstuff on hand to make, panada, a hot breakfast gruel affectionately known as ‘bully soup,’ which the main ingredients were watery corn meal and crumbled hardtack, both of which were standard issue.
Health food movement emerged in the nineteenth century United States, in a particular among followers of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church which emphasized a vegetarian lifestyle.
At that time most Americans did not consume enough dietary fiber and many suffered from digestive disorders as a result.
The association of certain factions in this church with the Battle Creek (Michigan) Sanitarium and the cereal experimentation which they inspired at this hospital gave the city of Battle Creek a head start in the breakfast cereal industry.
The early history of cereal breakfast originated out of the an interest in health foods that can be traced to the 1830s, and specifically to the experiments carried out from the the 1860s by Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, the pioneer nutritionist, at the sanitarium at Battle Creek, Michigan.
Kellogg was the leading promoter of vegetarianism of the era.
The modern breakfast cereals, however, are entirely precooked and eaten in cold milk. The first precooked cereal was probably invented in 1863 by Dr. James C. Jackson at Dansville, New York.
Jackson’s health food as made by rolling a coarse whole meal dough into thin sheets which were baked until they were hard and brittle loaves.
He broke up hardened loaves of unleavened whole grain bread into little pieces and served it for breakfast after soaking the brittle chunks overnight in milk. Jackson named this mixture granula.
Ganula, was the first cold breakfast cereal. It consisted id a twice baked wholemeal biscuit ground into crumbs, which had to be soaked on milk or water to make it even vaguely palatable.
In 1877, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, American health former, created a similar cereal called granola, but not until his invention of corn flakes in 1902 did cereal become a commercial success. At first, most cereals were marketed as pure, whole-grain foods.
It was then followed by a host of flaked, toasted and other prepared grains manufactured by Kellogg and competitors.
In 1898 Post also marketed Grape-Nuts, his version of Dr. Kellogg’s first cold, Prepared breakfast cereal. With a mastery adverting approach, Post was an almost overnight success with these two products netting a million dollars a year by around 1900.
Eventually, however, competition resulted in the addition of sugar and other food additives and in marketing campaigns directed at children, such as the inclusion of a premium or toy in the box.
By late 1905, the corn flake business was booming and other cereal manufacturers had gotten into this line. In January 1906, Post Cereals introduced a new version of the corn flakes.
It was C. W Post, the founder of Post Cereals who first clearly comprehend that convenience and flavor were more forceful and more widely appreciated advantages than were the healthfulness and vegetable origin previously relied upon as selling points by producers of these foods.
In the 1970s, as cereals came under attack for their lack of nutritive value, many manufacturers began adding nutrients. Unlike most other grain products, breakfast cereals have shown a steady increase in per capita consumption in the United States throughout the 20th cent.
History of Breakfast Cereal
