Wednesday, July 25, 2018

How Did Cereal Become a Staple Breakfast Item?



Cold cereal is a fairly American habit. The rest of the world eats a light meal of bread, fruit, and a couple of other normal foods, or maybe a hearty cooked meal if you do heavy labor. So why do we eat so much sugary cereal with milk? Yeah, it's tasty, but it's not good for us. Those cereals were born to be health foods, especially good for the suppression of sexual urges. Simon Whistler of Today I Found Out explains the evolution of breakfast itself first, and then the origins of the cereals we know.

3 comments:

gwdMaine said...

That was a riot. Dyspepsia? Really? And yep - Mr. Kellogg
was a fruitcake. But here's the real reason: Saturday
Morning Cartoons. You couldn't be watching Bugs, the
Roadrunner, or Roger Ramjet without a big bowl of Fruit
Loops. Or Cap'n Crunch. We weren't allowed to have Lucky
Charms (or anything else with freeze-dried marshmallows).
THOSE weren't any good for you. ..sigh..

And then all of sudden cereal was part of a "complete
breakfast" and there were pictures of eggs and bacon and
pancakes along with a glass of orange juice. Right. The
cost of orange juice aside, no parent in my neighborhood
got up on a Saturday morning to make their kid a complete
breakfast. Easier to have a second bowl of Fruit Loops.

gwdMaine said...

Oh - and Today I Found Out the real reason Euell Gibbons
died. It wasn't from eating pine trees, his "Back to Nature"
cereal did him in.

Miss Cellania said...

I seriously think that once moms found out kids could make their own breakfast just by pouring milk in a bowl, you could forget ever getting homemade biscuits again.