Why were Kellogg’s Corn Flakes invented?
Have you ever found yourself musing over the origins of your favourite breakfast cereal, the humble corn flake? No? Well, we’re here to tell you anyway. The reason behind the original – and now much-loved recipe – was to act as an ‘anti-masturbatory’ morning meal.
We break down why. Why were corn flakes invented? The popular cereal was first made back in 1894 by John Harvey Kellogg.
It was originally created as a healthy food for the patients of the sanitarium in which he worked, and its inception was functional: it was supposed to be healthy and deliberately bland. It seems odd that someone make a deliberately tasteless food, but it was all part of an extreme diet – promoted by his church – aimed at suppressing passion.
He was a Seventh-day Adventist, a branch of Christianity which advocated a strict vegetarian diet devoid of alcohol, caffeine or meat. In addition, Kellogg was a fervent believer of abstinence and believed sex and masturbation were unhealthy and abnormal. In his book,
Plain Facts for Old and Young: Embracing the Natural History and Hygiene of Organic Life he described what he saw as the negative effects of masturbation. He cited mood swings, bad posture, acne, baldness, stiff joints, palpitations as well as a taste for spicy food to be the side affects of the ‘double abominable’ crime.
Have you ever found yourself musing over the origins of your favourite breakfast cereal, the humble corn flake? No? Well, we’re here to tell you anyway. The reason behind the original – and now much-loved recipe – was to act as an ‘anti-masturbatory’ morning meal.
We break down why. Why were corn flakes invented? The popular cereal was first made back in 1894 by John Harvey Kellogg.
It was originally created as a healthy food for the patients of the sanitarium in which he worked, and its inception was functional: it was supposed to be healthy and deliberately bland. It seems odd that someone make a deliberately tasteless food, but it was all part of an extreme diet – promoted by his church – aimed at suppressing passion.
He was a Seventh-day Adventist, a branch of Christianity which advocated a strict vegetarian diet devoid of alcohol, caffeine or meat. In addition, Kellogg was a fervent believer of abstinence and believed sex and masturbation were unhealthy and abnormal. In his book,
Plain Facts for Old and Young: Embracing the Natural History and Hygiene of Organic Life he described what he saw as the negative effects of masturbation. He cited mood swings, bad posture, acne, baldness, stiff joints, palpitations as well as a taste for spicy food to be the side affects of the ‘double abominable’ crime.
