On Food and Cooking

American mix of eccentric health reformers,
fringe religion, and commercial canniness.
In the middle third of the 19th century, a
vegetarian craze arose in opposition to the
diet of salt beef and pork, hominy,
condiments, and alkali-raised white bread that
was prevalent at the time. A pure, plain diet
for America was the object, and the issue was
not only medical but moral. As Dr. John
Harvey Kellogg put it somewhat later in his
Plain Facts for Old and Young, “A man that
lives on pork, fine-flour bread, rich pies and
cakes, and condiments, drinks tea and coffee,
and uses tobacco, might as well try to fly as to
be chaste in thought.” Kellogg and his brother
Will Keith Kellogg, C. W. Post, and others
invented such virtuous preparations as
shredded wheat, wheat and corn flakes, and
Grape Nuts. These precooked cereals did offer
a light, simple alternative to the substantial
breakfasts of the day, became widely popular,
and quickly generated a large, inventive, and