Home » The daring invention of corn flakes that were supposed to cure us of passions

The daring invention of corn flakes that were supposed to cure us of passions

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On May 31, 1895, an application was submitted to the American Patent Office to patent a strange food used for sick people: i corn-flakes. The invention had taken place a few days earlier in a Michigan sanatorium, Battle Creek, run by Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, an Adventist doctor who directly experimented with the creation of vegetarian foods that also had a religious purpose. A good diet, he argued, would inspire better behaviors.

In short, it had been a few months since Doctor Kellogg had been trafficking in the kitchen with wheat, rice, oats and corn in search of something healthy, good and digestible but without success. The final formula he found by chance: he had left a mixture of stale wheat in the kitchen and when he returned, a couple of days later, instead of throwing it away, he spread it out, cooked it and became crunchy. Oddly it was good. It was mid-April 1895: for a few weeks the flakes, which were not yet corn, but wheat, were given to patients with milk just as they do now. They were really good. And on May 31, Dr. Kellogg introduced patent application for a product called Granose and later Granola.

The experiments continued and Dr. Kellogg realized that with corn the flakes were better: thus the corn-flakes were born which in 1906 John Harvey Kellogg, his brother, launched on the market with the family name but arguing with his brother because the recipe original had added a lot of sugar to make the flakes tastier and therefore more salable.

About the original invention there is a version circulating that the corn flakes also served the purpose of reduce masturbation. The thing seems really bizarre: it is true that Dr. Kellogg was a religious fanatic who propagated a diet without alcohol, meat and coffee as a tool to suppress passions and that in one of his books the damages (invented, yes) of masturbation are listed. . But in fact, beyond click-baiting effect on posts that link corn-flakes to masturbation, there is no reliable confirmation of this rumor. The connection made by several historians is this: since a diet of meat, according to Kellogg, stimulated the nerves and had effects on the sexual organs, a diet of cereals, not having those effects, could be a remedy for autoeroticism.

Fortunately there is no trace of all this in the corn flakes: the Kellogg company still has today 31,000 employees and a turnover of 14 billion dollars selling corn flakes and other puffed grains.

We are building an Almanac of Italian innovation and every day we try to remember a memorable date. Today, for example, we have not found it. But there are a lot of them coming. To propose Italian innovation stories for the Almanac write me at [email protected]

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