Made In America - Bill Bryson [126]
As the nineteenth century wore on and the American diet became consistently livelier, it inevitably sparked alarm among those who believed that sensual pleasures were necessarily degenerate. There arose mighty bands of men and women who believed with a kind of religious fervour that the consumption of the wrong foods would lead to the breakdown of the nation’s moral fibre. One man went so far as to form a Society for the Suppression of Eating, which would appear to be taking matters about as far as they will go. Others were only slightly more accommodating to the need for sustenance. Typical of the breed was the Revd Sylvester Graham, who equated insanity with eating ketchup and mustard, and believed that the consumption of meat would result in the sort of hormonal boisterousness that leads men to take advantage of pliant women. Many believed him – so many indeed that by mid-century the nation was not only following his cheerless recipes, but many thousands of people were living in Graham boarding-houses, where his dietary precepts were imposed with rigour. Then there was Horace Fletcher, who gave the world the notion that each bite of food should be chewed thirty-two times. Though he had no standing as a nutritionist – he was an importer by trade – that didn’t stop him from disseminating his theories in a phenomenally successful book, The ABC of Nutrition, published in 1903.
But the zenith of America’s long, obsessive coupling of food with moral rectitude came with a Seventh Day Adventist doctor named John Harvey Kellogg who in 1876 took over the failing Western Health Reform Institute in Battle Creek, Michigan, renamed it the Medical and Surgical Sanitarium (though everyone soon knew it as the Battle Creek Sanitarium or simply the Kellogg) and introduced a regime of treatments that was as bizarre as it was popular. Possibly the two were not unconnected.
Patients who were underweight were confined to their beds with sandbags on their abdomens and forced to eat up to twenty-six meals a day. They were not permitted any physical exertion. Even their teeth were brushed by an attendant lest they needlessly expend a calorie.17 The hypertensive were required to eat grapes and nothing else – up to 14 lb. of them daily. Others with less easily discernible maladies were confined to wheelchairs for months on end and fed experimental foods such as gluten wafers and ‘a Bulgarian milk preparation known as yogurt’. Kellogg himself was a trifle singular in his habits. It was his practice to dictate long tracts on the evils of meat-eating and masturbation (the one evidently led to the other) while seated on the lavatory or while riding his bicycle in circles around the lawn. Despite – or very possibly because of – these peculiarities, Kellogg’s Temple of Health’, as he liked to call it, thrived and grew into a huge complex of buildings with such classy amenities as elevators, room service and a palm house with its own orchestra. Among its devoted and well-heeled patrons were Teddy Roosevelt and John D. Rockefeller.
Throughout much of his life, Kellogg nurtured a quiet obsession with inventing a flaked breakfast cereal. One night the process came to him in a dream. He hastened in his nightshirt to the kitchen where he boiled some wheat, rolled it out into strips and baked it in the oven. It was not only tasty but sufficiently unusual as to be without question good for you. Dr Kellogg’s patients simply couldn’t get enough of it. One of these patients was a young man named C. W. Post, who spent nine months at the sanitarium sitting listlessly and needlessly in a wheelchair before abruptly embracing Christian Scientism and fleeing. One thing Post took away with him was a profound respect for the commercial possibilities of Dr . Kellogg’s cereal. Unable to get a licence from Kellogg, he decided to make his own, and in a breath-takingly short time became one of America’s wealthiest men. Among Post’s inventions were Grape-Nuts