[attach id=239591 size="medium"]“Statistics show that the British and the Irish are the largest eaters of puffed, flaked, flavoured, shaped, sugared, salted and extruded cereals in the world.”[/attach]
There has recently been some local interest from readers regarding how healthy breakfast cereal is and what the benefits of eating it are.
The rise of breakfast cereal, which is a relatively new addition to our diet, is almost on a par with junk food, and the evolution of this type of food is very interesting.
As with junk food, the concept began in the US. Basically, breakfast cereal is the result of an agricultural surplus which was turned into a profitable export.
Cereal is a degraded food which must have any nutritional benefit, or goodness, artificially added. So the huge marketing campaign explains how any vitamin from C to D and any mineral from zinc to calcium has been added to make cereal a healthier food.
The addition of breakfast cereal to our diets is not Europe-wide. Many countries have continued with their traditional breakfasts. I am sure you have been offered a continental breakfast at a hotel. This can range from a croissant and coffee to ham, cheese and various meats.
Only certain countries are huge consumers of all types of breakfast cereal, primarily the UK, although they are also popular in Malta.
Porridge and oats are not to be included in this generalisation. Porridge has been around for generations and is very different to the agricultural surplus referred to above. A century ago, simple cereal grains, cooked either as porridge or bread, were the staples of breakfast all around the world.
Statistics show that the British and the Irish are the largest eaters of puffed, flaked, flavoured, shaped, sugared, salted and extruded cereals in the world. They consume an average of 6.7 kilos of cereals per person in the UK, and 8.4 kilos each in Ireland.
Mediterranean countries are generally credited with a healthy diet and have, so far, kept this form of instant breakfast down to an average one kilo per person per year.
Cereal is a degraded food which must have any nutritional benefit artificially added
The French have proved culturally resistant to transatlantic pressure in this, as in other fields. Meanhile, Eastern Europeans, deprived of marketing until the fall of communism and the breakup of the Soviet Union, have still barely heard of processed cereals.
So before looking at the health benefits of breakfast cereal, let’s look at its history. Prepackaged, ready-to-eat breakfast cereals began with the American temperance movement in the 19th century. In the 1830s, the Rev. Sylvester Graham preached the virtues of a vegetarian diet to his congregation, particularly the importance of wholemeal flour.
Meat-eating, he said, excited the carnal passions. Granula, considered the first ready-to-eat breakfast cereal, was developed from his Graham flour by one of his followers, James Caleb Jackson, for patients at Jackson’s Water Cure Resort. It was a baked lump of slow-cooked wheat and water, said to be hard as rock and had to be broken up and soaked overnight to be edible. It was sold at 10 times the cost of its ingredients. The business motive linked to breakfast cereal was established.
Following on from Jackson, the Seventh-Day Adventists took up the mission begun by Graham. A colony of them had set up in a small town called Battle Creek near the American Great Lakes in Michigan. There, they established the Western Health Reform Institute in 1866 to cure hog guzzling, and in their opinion, degenerate Americans of their dyspepsia and vices.
John Harvey Kellogg turned it into the famous Battle Creek Sanatorium, a mix of health spa, holiday camp and experimental hospital. Kellogg, a sort of early cross between Billy Graham and Gillian McKeith, set about devising cures for what he believed were the common ills of the day, in particular, constipation and masturbation. In Kellogg’s mind, the two were closely linked, the common cause being a lack of fibre, both dietary and moral.
As well as prescribing daily cold water baths and exercise drills, creating health-giving foods for patients was a major preoccupation.
Kellogg, his wife and his younger brother William Keith experimented in the sanatorium kitchen to produce an easily digested form of cereal. They came up with their own highly profitable granula, but were promptly sued by Jackson, the original maker of granula, and had to change the name to granola.
Around this time, an entrepreneur Henry Perky had also invented a way of passing steamed wheat through rollers, one grooved and one smooth, to form strands that could be pressed into biscuits to make the first shredded wheat.
Kellogg experimented further with his team and eventually found a way of rolling cooked wheat to make flakes which could then be baked. Cornflakes followed when the Kelloggs worked out how to use cheap American corn instead of wheat, although initially they had problems keeping them crisp and preventing them from going rancid.
This great leap forward was part and parcel of other major developments in the industrialisation of our diets. It is usually the combination of technological advances and the right economic conditions that lead to radical changes in what we eat.
kathryn@maltanet.net