Today, August 1, would be a good day to have shredded wheat for breakfast. Why? Because August 1, 1893, is the day Henry Perky opened up an exhibit at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago to show off his “little whole wheat mattresses.” His original idea was that he’d sell the machines he’d come up with to make shredded wheat, but there was much more interest in the cereal itself. Perky changed plans and set up The Cereal Machine Company in Boston to sell the stuff — the name of the company quickly became The Shredded Wheat Company.
Perky was slightly eccentric. He was as much a food faddist as John Kellogg and Charles Post, and in fact Perky was the first one to mass produce and nationally market what he called the “cookless breakfast food.” The cereals (et cetera) marketed by Kellogg and Post followed his lead. Perky’s biggest mistake was probably not naming his company after himself; after all “Perky” would be a pretty good name for a breakfast cereal.
He didn’t think Shredded Wheat had to be limited to breakfast, though. When he built a new factory in Niagara Falls (he liked the idea of inexpensive hydroelectric power), he held a luncheon to celebrate its opening and invited politicians, authors, journalists, and anybody else he thought could promote his products. One of the authors, Pierre Berton, did write about it, and that’s why we know what Perky served: “…a Shredded Wheat drink, Shredded Wheat biscuit toast, roast turkey stuffed with Shredded Wheat, and Shredded Wheat ice cream.”
Shredded wheat itself isn’t really that hard to make; you just boil wheat until it’s a kind of dough, roll it out (you put grooves in your rollers to produce the strands) and bake it. Perky got a patent on it, but as soon as the patent expired Kellogg’s came up with their own version. The National Biscuit Company, which by then had bought Perky’s Shredded Wheat Company, sued (over the name “shredded wheat”, not over the stuff itself), and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court in 1938. The justices decided that the name “shredded wheat” had passed into the public domain at the same point that the patent expired. The justices didn’t mention what they’d had for breakfast.
The idea of some kind of precooked grain for breakfast wasn’t new in the 1890s, and it wasn’t entirely restricted to the US, but it was the 1890s that saw the breakfast cereal industry appear with national marketing based on health claims. The whole operation was really because of three people: Henry Perky, C.W.Post, and John Kellogg. They were all kooks, at least when it came to anything involved with food and health. Kellogg was the furthest along in his, um, eccentricities. He was actually a doctor, and ran a sanitarium where he treated patients based on his ideas that most disease is a result of what you eat. And what you eat, he thought, ought to be vegetarian, low-protein, and high in fiber. Not coincidentally, he sold food products that met all those criteria, including Kelloggs Corn Flakes (originally called Granose), which he patented in the 1890s, about the same time Perky patented Shredded Wheat.
C.W.Post, like Perky and Kellogg, was a vegetarian, but he came to food evangelism after suffering a nervous breakdown and being treated at Kellogg’s sanitarium. Immediately after his stay (it’s been suggested that the sequence was a bit suspicious), Post, who was already a successful businessman, founded the Postum Cereal Company and introduced Postum, Toasties (corn flakes) and Malted Nuts (same thing as Grape Nuts; no real nuts involved). I’m sure it was just a coincidence that these were surprisingly similar to existing Kellogg’s products.
The kookiness of the founders of the American breakfast cereal industry went beyond their beliefs about disease being entirely based on what you ate. Kellogg was the most extreme, and he was the one that came to breakfast cereal because of his beliefs. The other two got into it mostly as a business opportunity. He received several patents for medical equipment for radiant heat treatment and various kinds of “movement therapy.” Nowadays we’d probably call his machines “exercise equipment.” But he also held some strange beliefs about water, of all things. He claimed that water had the highest “specific heat” of any compound (there is no such thing as “specific heat”) and claimed its primary medical use was as a “refrigerant” — that is, if you drink water, it cools you off. This is sort of indirectly true, but it doesn’t work the way Kellogg claimed. He also claimed that water lowers your “nervous sensibility” and if you apply it the right way (his way, of course), it reduces pain. Also you should drink ten glasses of water every day.
Kellogg thought the eugenics movement, which was well known in the first couple of decades of the 20th century, was a great idea, and “something should be done” about immigrants “damaging the American gene pool.” Overall, except for the cereal, Kellogg would be rightly forgotten.
C.W.Post’s weirdness was more circumscribed; he created his own town in Texas (Post City) as a model, utopian community. He built all the buildings, including stores, city hall, houses, churches, and everything Post thought the perfect town ought to have. Because Texas is dry, and Post wanted his town to have enough water, for several years he tried various methods of rainmaking. He rented everything out, including farms, because he’d bought all the land in the entire town. People really moved there — well, about 1000 of them — and when Post died in 1914, they incorporated the place as an official town. Post, Texas is still there. But Post himself never lived in Post City. He lived in California, where his various businesses enabled him to amass one of the largest fortunes in the world at the time. His daughter inherited all of it and moved to an estate on Long Island. She sold it in 1951, and it became C. W. Post College.
Henry Perky sold his company and retired in 1902 to publish a book on nutrition (and oral hygiene, for some reason), which he kept revising, eventually reaching 10 different editions. He moved to Maryland and bought a huge plot of land where he started building a boarding school (for both men and women) where they would learn “scientific farming” and “domestic science.” He was going to call it the Oread School, and got as far as completing the main building, printing elaborate brochures, and even enrolling a few students (tuition was free). But then fell off a horse in 1906, died from his injuries, and the school never opened.
These three guys had a big impact on what people were thinking (and eating) in the first half of the 20th century — but it probably wasn’t because of what they themselves thought. I mean, at least half of what they thought was borderline gibberish. Their impact was because of advertising. Kelloggs, Post Cereal, and the National Biscuit Company (Nabisco) advertised the heck out of breakfast cereal. And in those days you could get away with saying just about anything in an ad.
One early Shredded Wheat ad explained (at great length) that “pound for pound there is more muscle-making, brain-building material in Shredded Wheat than in beef, bacon, or eggs.” It argued that you don’t get “strong as an ox” by eating beef; you should eat what the ox eats: wheat. They hoped readers would skip over the part about “strong as an ox” being just a metaphor.
Kellogg’s ads included similar health claims, but they also had a campaign featuring a lovely model, the “sweetheart of the corn.” It’s an odd idea, and it’s based on a pun. Corn flakes are made out of corn grit, which is mostly the material in the middle of the corn kernels. The heart, so to speak. But the girl made a much better image than a pile of corn grit.
The “this is good for you” advertising strategy worked for lots of other products, too. Wonder Bread, for one, was marketed for decades as “building strong bodies” — eight ways at first, and later on 12 ways as they included even more additives. What they didn’t say was that it wasn’t even their idea; adding nutrients to flour was a government program that was part of the New Deal, and the process was meant to combat malnutrition-related childhood diseases (at which, in fact, it succeeded). But all that advertising did manage to change the way Americans eat. In other parts of the world there isn’t always a category such as “breakfast food” — food is just food in many places, regardless of when you eat it. But here in the US, “breakfast is the most important meal of the day.” That was just an advertising slogan too.
