Made In America - Bill Bryson [127]
As it dawned on townspeople that breakfast cereals were awfully easy to make, imitators sprang up. Soon, it appears, almost everyone in town was at it. By the turn of the century at least forty-four companies in Battle Creek were churning out breakfast cereals with names like Grip Nuts, Hello-Billo, Malt-Ho, Flake-Ho, Korn Kure, Tryabita, Tryachewa, Oatsina, Food of Eden and Orange Meat (which, like Grape-Nuts, contained none of the implied ingredients).18 Without exception these products were sold as health foods.*25 Each packet of Grape-Nuts contained an illustrated leaflet, The Road to Wellville, explaining how a daily dose of the enclosed toasted wheat and barley granules would restore depleted brain and nerve cells, and build strong red blood. For a short but deliriously exciting time fortunes were there for the taking. A Methodist preacher named D. D. Martin cooked up some healthful goop on the kitchen stove, dubbed it Per-Fo and immediately sold the formula for $100,000. Curiously almost the only person in Battle Creek unable to capitalize on Kellogg’s invention was Kellogg himself. Not until 1907, when he at last brought to market his cornflakes, did he begin to get the credit and wealth his invention merited.
Preoccupation with health-enhancing qualities became a theme for all manner of foods. Moxie, known for its soft drinks, was founded in 1885 as the Moxie Nerve Food Company of Boston, and Dr Pepper, founded in the same year, was so called not because the name was catchy but because it sounded sternly healthful. For a time, it seemed that no food product could hope to sell unless it dealt vigorously with a range of human frailties. Quaker Oats claimed to curb nervousness and constipation. Fleischmann’s Yeast not only soothed frayed nerves and loosed the bowels, but also dealt vigorously with indigestion, skin disorders, tooth decay, obesity and a vague but ominous-sounding disorder called ‘fallen stomach’. Fleischmann’s kept up these sweeping claims – occasionally added to them – until ordered to desist by the Federal Trade Commission in 1938 on the grounds that there wasn’t a shred of evidence to support any of them.19
Against such a background it is little wonder that Americans turned with a certain enthusiasm to junk food. The term junk food didn’t enter the American vocabulary until 1973, but the concept was there long before, and it began with one of the great breakthroughs in food history: the development of a form of edible solid chocolate.
Though a New World food (the Mayas and Aztecs so prized it that they used cocoa beans as money), chocolate took a long time to become a central part of the American diet. Not until just before the Revolution did it become known in colonial America, and then only as a drink. At first chocolate was so exotic that it was spelled and pronounced in a variety of ways – chockolatta, chuchaletto, chocholate, chockolatto – before finally settling in the late eighteenth century into something close to the original Nahuatl Indian word, xocólatl. Chocolate came from the cacao tree, which somehow became transliterated into English as cocoa (pronounced at first with three syllables: co-co-a).20 The chocolate bar was invented in England in the 1840s and milk chocolate in Switzerland some thirty years later, but neither became popular in America until Milton Stavely Hershey gave the world the nickel Hershey bar in 1903. (The price would stay a nickel for the next sixty-seven years, but only at a certain palpable cost to the bar’s dimensions. Just in the quarter-century following World War II, the bar shrank a dozen times, until by 1970, when it was beginning to look perilously like an after-dinner mint, the bar was reinvigorated in size and the price raised accordingly.)
As is so often the case with American entrepreneurs, Milton Hershey was an unlikely success. His formal education ended with the fourth grade and he spent decades as a struggling, small-time