The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [101]
John Harvey was the front man, and his purpose for the cereal was to help liberate people from their desire for meat and sex. I’ll say more about his sexual obsessions in the chapter on sex, but here we may note that he took both desires as bestial. Feed a vicious wolf cereal mush for long enough and he will cease to bare his teeth or leap after a raw steak. The cereal scrubbed out your animal nature. Kellogg’s ideas were powerful for decades; then they faded. John Harvey had wanted to keep the Kellogg movement a crusading happiness treatment, but as he got socially weirder (white suit, white Australian cockatoo), his brother Keith gained control of the company. Keith put sugar in the flakes and removed from the company literature all diatribes against meat and sex. Over the years, the advertising followed wider social trends. The sexual revolution of the 1960s discredited the idea of prescribing abstinence for happiness.
That was the rise and fall of a belief that whole grain could and should be used to help men and women to not have sex. I’ve never noticed in myself or others any reason to correlate vegetarianism with celibacy or carnivorousness with Eros. In fact, a nice steak can make you too greasy and satisfied to go looking for love. Furthermore, Kellogg could not display enough angry meat-eating wolves and friendly bread-eating wolves to convince me that meat makes you violent. But the display was convincing to Kellogg’s audience, because it went along with the other things they believed. The concept of dry cereal and milk, and the idea that this should be breakfast, are leftovers from Kellogg’s era, but they now serve new symbolic purposes in an almost wholly new trance of value.
Breakfast cereal remained a meal invested with all sorts of meaning. It is surprising to realize that what we shake out of a box in the morning has somehow managed to take on the name of its whole category, as if there were a new cheese you eat in a bowl as prelunch and we called the product “dairy.” Most people in the world live on cereal, in a variety of forms. Cereals are grass with edible starchy grains: wheat, rice, rye, oats, corn, and sorghum (big in Africa and Asia). Such grains have sustained civilization in almost every case of the latter’s appearance, but they have very little protein and limited other nutrients. Cereal is not the best breakfast a twentieth-century mom could envision. So in the first half of the twentieth century the cereal companies aimed marketing at children, and the sugar content increased steadily until, in 1956, Kellogg’s Sugar Snaps came in at 56 percent sugar. That eventually woke people up, and the backlash caused the cereal companies to throw a bunch of vitamins and minerals into the flakes, puffs, and shreds, “fortifying” them.
In another strange turn, in the 1960s granola became so linked with body naturalism and free love that the word became a slang referent to a whole social category. Granola was seen as anticorporate and antiestablishment: a natural, unprocessed food that went with natural, unprocessed desires. As we saw, it was actually the first packaged premade breakfast cereal, invented by a company, stolen by another, but the whole grains stood out enough in 1960s America that the term granola was taken to mean naturalism in food and mores. Graham and Kellogg would have been shocked to see granola touted by sensualists. They might be even more surprised if they came back now and found that in a stupendous turnaround, here in the twenty-first century, breakfast cereal will make you sexy. What was once going to keep us clean and sexless is now marketed as offering youth and sexiness. Television commercials current in the 2000s show slim women getting slimmer by eating wheat-or cornflakes, ending the thirty-second spot in tight jeans or a bikini.