Who Made That Granola?

You can trace breakfast cereal back to gruel-eating ancient Greeks, but it wasn’t until the 19th century that the idea of eating cold cereal was embraced. In 1863, Dr. James Caleb Jackson, a health reformer who believed illness was rooted in the stomach, began experimenting with cold cereal to augment the mineral-spring treatments at his sanitarium in upstate New York. He baked graham flour into brittle cakes, which he then crumbled and baked again. It was not an immediate success; in fact, it was edible only when soaked in milk overnight. Even so, Jackson’s granula, as he called it, would soon have competition. It was not long before Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, a Michigan man with a sanitarium of his own, was also promoting a healthful cold cereal.  MORE...