A Brief History of Breakfast Cereal

You can trace breakfast cereal back to gruel-eating ancient Greeks, but it wasn't until the 19th century that the idea of eating cold cereal was embraced. In 1863, Dr. James Caleb Jackson, a health reformer who believed illness was rooted in the stomach, began experimenting with cold cereal to augment the mineral-spring treatments at his sanitarium in upstate New York.

He baked graham flour into brittle cakes, which he then crumbled and baked again. It was not an immediate success; in fact, it was edible only when soaked in milk overnight. Even so, Jackson's granula, as he called it, would soon have competition. It was not long before Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, a Michigan man with a sanitarium of his own, was also promoting a healthful cold cereal. Kellogg ran the Battle Creek Sanitarium, popular with luminaries like Amelia Earhart.




He, too, was a digestive evangelist, and in the late 1870s or early '80s, Kellogg combined wheat flour, oatmeal and cornmeal into a mixture that he also called granula. Jackson sued. Kellogg duly switched the ''u'' to an ''o,'' and by 1889, he was selling two tons of granola a week. Kellogg went on to invent the cereal flake, which led to the Kellogg's cereal empire, which led to Froot Loops and Cocoa Krispies.

Granola was revived in the late '60s as a countercultural corrective to the new sugary cereals. The granola proselytizer of the era, Layton Gentry (known as Johnny Granola Seed), promoted his popular blend of rolled oats, wheat germ and sesame seeds. Like so many endeavors with utopian origins, it fast became a corporate gold mine.

The first mass-market granola, Heartland Natural Cereal, was introduced in 1972. Today granola is fully mainstream, with countless flavor iterations and scales of production. Among the fastest-growing segments of granola at Whole Foods are the artisanal, small-batch varieties, like Milk & Honey and Nature's Path Love Crunch. ''It's a slightly higher price point,'' says Errol Schweizer, head of Whole Foods' grocery department. ''But much better quality.''

Of course, the nutritional value has also evolved since 1863.

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