The bizarre backstory of cornflakes

The third inductee to the Attic of Fame.

An audio version is here for paying subscribers.

This is part three of the series Attic of Fame, where each month I induct one seemingly normal person, place or thing with hidden oddities.

---

Kellogg’s cornflakes. The most bog-standard cereal for the most ordinary breakfast. What could be less interesting? And yet lurking beneath these ubiquitous boxes of blandness is a story of many quirks.

The origin story

Everyone loves a good origin story. By which I mean, every marketing executive loves a good origin story. Like Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield taking a $5 correspondence course in ice cream making, Play-Doh being originally invented as a wallpaper cleaner and Google arising from a dream.

But Kellogg’s play down the motivations behind the 1890s invention of cornflakes by John Harvey Kellogg. Which were that he wanted to create a breakfast of such extreme blandness that it would discourage two things: indigestion and masturbation.

I personally wasn’t aware of the link between diet and self-love, but Mr Kellogg wrote about how rich and spicy foods excited the body into acts of ‘the solitary vice’. This makes me see Levi Roots, for example, in a whole new light.

He believed this disgusting practice could lead to general infirmity, defective development, mood swings, fickleness, bashfulness, boldness, bad posture, stiff joints, acne and epilepsy.

But he didn’t appear to have 100% faith in the efficiency of cornflakes as he also recommended sewing the foreskin up with silver wire. Don’t worry, he didn’t ignore the ladies! They were advised to have pure carbolic acid rubbed into their private parts.

Battle Creek Sanitarium

The birthplace of cornflakes was the Battle Creek Sanitarium, where John Harvey Kellogg was the Chief Medical Officer, despite only attending school between the ages of nine and eleven as his father believed in the imminence of the Second Coming.

The Battle Creek Sanitarium was a wellness resort so like a 19th-century American Champneys and was also affectionally known as ‘The San’, much like the sickbay in Mallory Towers and St Clare’s but perhaps with fewer patients who’d experienced bad weather while playing truant and got pneumonia.

Mr Kellogg actually invented the word ‘sanitarium’ by cleverly changing two letters of ‘sanatorium’, and preventing everyone from assuming it was full of people convalescing with the consumption.

Which it wasn’t. It was full of people having procedures like colonic irrigation with a mixture of yoghurt and water. John Kellogg was a big fan of these making him very much like a 19th-century Gillian McKeith.

John’s brother Will also worked there as a bookkeeper and there is some disagreement as to how the cornflakes came about and who was responsible. The only consensus is that this anti-masturbation breakfast started with some dough being accidentally left out overnight. But the brothers only really fell out when Will suggested adding sugar to the recipe.

John Harvey Kellogg

John was horrified at this suggestion. This was a man who was obsessed with healthy living. He didn’t smoke, drink alcohol or eat meat. He was so opposed to any kind of excitement that he didn’t even consummate his forty-one-year marriage.

It is ironic that if he were alive today, he’d no doubt be advocating against the ultra-processed food of cornflakes.

But they were not his only contribution to the 1890s health food aisle. He patented a process for making peanut butter and invented the first mass-marketed meat substitutes made from peanuts and gluten. (I will be throwing out all my Quorn and seeking out the recipe.)

He also developed a special soy milk designed for babies, which was shipped to the Dionne quintuplets, who from birth had been given a mixture of cow’s milk, boiled water, corn syrup and rum.

My favourite John Harvey Kellogg invention though is the mechanical horse. Imagine an exercise bike. Now turn that bike into a horse. These were used for exercise in The San and also the White House where Calvin Coolidge galloped on the spot three times a day. John also created a mechanical camel. But not elephant, zebra, cow or giraffe.

So he wasn’t that great. In fact, truth be told he ended up getting heavily into eugenics as he got older so was basically a terrible person.

I hope I haven’t put you off your cornflakes.

Mechanical horse / Wikipedia Commons