Chances are you’ve never noticed it so strange that there’s an entire supermarket shelf dedicated to nothing but cereal. For most of us cereal is the ultimate convenient breakfast and even the sugariest varieties claim to offer nutritional benefits and a balanced start to your day. Every brand tries to convince you that it’s something different something better and there’s probably at least one you’ll buy. The “kids only” sugar bombs boast wholegrain cereal while Special K is loaded with chocolate chips and sugary yogurt clusters.
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 American English Podcast | 2024-03-25 04:00:05 |  3,024 Views |
160.2 – How Cereal Became the Most Popular Breakfast Food in the US
But it wasn’t always this way. Cereal’s rise to fame as America’s breakfast staple is a remarkable feat not of taste or culture but of marketing and packaging design. It’s a centuries-long history of advertising a brilliant campaign that capitalized on the intersection of industrialization health consciousness and shifting class attitudes that completely upended the way Americans ate. And it all began at a time when products were being prepared to transcend regional tastes through the rise of mass marketing.
“America was as big and diverse at the turn of the century as it is today” explains historical gastronome Sarah Lohman. “Fannie Farmer’s The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book from 1906 which I think is a pretty good indication of what the average multigenerational American family from the Midwest or New England eats or wants to eat shows a meal that includes: fruit; hot cereals like Quaker oatmeal or hominy; a hearty cut of meat like steak ‘warmed over lamb’ or halibut pan-fried; potatoes toast or muffins; and of course coffee.” In other words a breakfast of only hominy or porridge was considered a nutritionally unbalanced breakfast for a poor family—not exactly something you’d aspire to. Cereal changed all that.
Breakfast cereal can be credited to Dr. John Harvey Kellogg who ran the Battle Creek Sanitarium a vaunted Seventh-day Adventist health and wellness resort in Michigan. “If you were upper middle class or above it was a fashionable place to go to get treatment for all sorts of ailments or just general health” says Lohman. Kellogg a staunch vegetarian who was especially interested in bowel movements advocated eating everything from seaweed to yogurt to nuts and grains — a radical departure from the American meat-centric diet. Of course most of us know Kellogg’s name from Corn Flakes which as the story goes were first invented at “The San” after some dough went stale and they tried baking it anyway.
