• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

In the mid–nineteenth century, James Caleb Jackson took up Graham’s antisex wheat cure and added water: hydropathy, a precursor to modern hydrotherapy. It was an aggressive incarnation of the water cure, and it usually including someone being hosed down, hard. In 1859 Jackson opened a health spa in upstate New York, featuring lectures against sex, water treatments, and, in the dining hall, vegetables and Graham bread. The spa tried to sell Graham bread in the gift shop, but it went stale too fast. Its appeal was supposed to have been its homemade nature, that it was a real organic perishable, yet capitalism is about shelf life. In 1863 Jackson cooked up a hard bread made out of Graham flour, broke it into chunks, and told people to soak the chunks in milk overnight and have the mush for a healthful breakfast. He called it Granula. It was the first prepared and packaged breakfast cereal, if not exactly ready to eat.

At around this time the pro-bread, antisex, anticaffeine, vegetarian, temperance movement found one of its greatest religious leaders. In 1864, Ellen G. White (1827–1915), cofounder of the Seventh-Day Adventists, brought a group of followers with her to Jackson’s spa. White’s church had grown out of a prophecy, by one William Miller, that the return of Jesus, or Advent, was going to occur in 1843. When 1843 came and the end of the world did not, the group adjusted their calculations and decided it was to happen on October 22, 1844. That date came and went, too, also without bugles from heaven. Most of the followers cut and ran, but a small group decided that something indeed had happened. White was the most important of these. She claimed to have received prophecies from God that encouraged her to reveal Saturday as the true Sabbath. She found Graham’s diet reform inspiring and added it to her mission. Consider the song “The Health Reform,” written by one of the Seventh-Day elders.

First goes the tobacco, most filthy of all,

Then drugs, pork and whisky, together must fall,

Then coffee and spices, and sweet-meats and tea,

And fine flour and flesh-meats and pickles must flee.

Oh, yes, I see it is so,

And the clearer it is the farther I go.4

It was not uncommon to see danger in strong flavors. In our society, pickles are considered so innocuous that it is wonderfully instructive to find them on the list of what “must flee.” White and her husband moved the group out to Battle Creek, Michigan, in 1860. Having visited Jackson’s spa, she reported receiving a divine mandate to open her own, the Western Health Reform Institute. White brought a strict attitude to American spas. The WHR Institute muddled along for ten years before its famed, awful, unforgettable director came along: John Harvey Kellogg.

Imagine you were raised in a culture that told you pickles were bad for you. Maybe you wouldn’t believe it, but it is likely that, even so, if you made short work of a jar of gherkins you would feel a little guilty. But a lot of people raised in a world where pickles are said to be bad never even consider that the whole thing is nonsense. We have been spared this burden only by the happenstance of the roulette of time. It can be salubrious to meditate on such narrow escapes, but if that is not enough, a good look at Kellogg should do the trick.

Kellogg’s family converted to White’s Seventh-Day Adventist religion in the year he was born, and at the age of twenty-four, in 1876, he became medical superintendent at the spa. White sent him to a hydropathy school in New Jersey, and from there Kellogg went on to study medicine and surgery at New York’s Bellevue Hospital and other notable institutions. In 1878, back at Battle Creek, Kellogg made up his own version of Granula, and sold it under the same name. Jackson sued Kellogg over the name and won, so Kellogg changed the name of his product to Granola. His wife, Ella Kellogg, wrote cookbooks inventing different ways to use the stuff. Around 1897 John Harvey and his brother Will Keith Kellogg founded the Sanitas Food Company—the name yet another