Before appearing on the breakfast table around the world, the Kellogg name first appeared in Michigan in the mid-19th century.e century, when the patriarch of this family of sixteen children set up his broom factory in the small town of Battle Creek. The siblings grow up in the values that are instilled in them, those of the Seventh-day Adventists.
In short, it is one of the many branches of American Protestantism, which is rather progressive. Its main manager, Ellen Whiteengages the young church on the path of the great social struggles which shape the era: the separation of churches and state, religious freedom, humanitarian action, the rights of women and minorities, education, health…
Indeed, it is towards health that one of the most promising members of the family, John Harvey Kellogg, is moving. In 1863, when Ellen White began campaigning for vast health reforms, the boy was only a dozen years old, but quickly left his father’s broom factory to join the Adventist publishing house in Battle as a printer’s apprentice. Creek, Review and Herald – the best possible place to devour the writings of Ellen White.
Financed by her and her husband, John then embarked on medical studies in New York. He comes away convinced that it is through diet that we can prevent or cure certain diseases. Kellogg already defends the idea that the good balance of intestinal flora is essential to health. As a doctor and surgeon, he actually extends the ideals that Ellen White has already summarized with the concept of “biological life” (biologic living): good health is only the fruit of a healthy life which combines, among other things, the quality of food with physical exercise and life in the great outdoors.
Yogurt enemas
At age 24, Kellogg became head of the Institute of Health Reform founded in his hometown by the Adventist movement, the movement’s first medical institution. Two years later, the young doctor renamed it the Battle Creek Sanitarium – a sanitarium, not a sanatorium. Where the second focuses on treating tuberculosis patients, the first aims more broadly. In Battle Creek, it’s all about getting people back into shape by leading them toward a healthy lifestyle, the establishment being both a hospital and a spa.
Light therapy, hydrotherapy, breathing exercises, it feels like a spa town. And it works with the fire of God: quickly, the complex can accommodate up to 1,300 patients and the country’s biggest celebrities flock there to receive treatment. Driven by his Adventist convictions, Kellogg takes care to welcome all patients, from the richest to the poorest. A born inventor, he also developed original instruments such as a heated operating table, intended for women about to give birth.
Always passionate about nutrition issues, Kellogg also works a lot on balanced diet. In Battle Creek, we practice intestinal enemas with water, but also with yogurt, to implant the good bacteria in the intestines. Although he is a vegetarian by his faith, Kellogg also believes as a doctor that the non-meat diet is healthier.
He considers meat to be too rich a food and pushes his patients to ban it, just like alcohol – a frankly avant-garde approach at a time when the idea we have of a good meal is It must be in the stomach. Lots of protein, a lot of fat, twelve eggs, potatoes and a good rib of beef, a whiskey or two to wash it all down, that’s what we call good food.
The high moral standing of corn flake
That said, obviously not everyone could afford meat in the United States of the 19th century.e century. Kellogg is well placed to know that in this era, the poorest people could not afford to eat bacon at every meal. In a lot of families, breakfast is limited to oatmeal or porridge, with a detail that says a lot about patriarchy: in the household, the one who gets up at any time to prepare all that , it is obviously the wife.
It was by looking for ways to make the lives of mothers easier that Kellogg began to design biscuits and nut and cereal preparations that were quick and easy to use. By adding wheat, oats and corn, Kellogg invented granola – yes, it’s him1. And it is again he who develops a technique for making cereal petals “blown” at high temperature, which are easier to preserve afterwards: wheat, rice, and corn.
Cornflakes were born, but for Kellogg, the nutritional aspect is only one of the advantages of its latest invention. He expects a lot from it to fight against what is, in his eyes, the great evil of the century: masturbation.
To follow the reasoning of Dr Kellogg, hold on to the branches. As a convinced Adventist, Kellogg is convinced that there is a link between poor nutrition and physical, but also moral, decay. He is also convinced that every human being has a sort of finite reserve of vital energy from which he continually draws. And don’t waste it: Kellogg is convinced that masturbating is wasting this beautiful energy.
A fault coupled with a sin that the doctor intends to avoid by carefully avoiding that his products have any taste – it is a question of eating healthily, not of having fun, and the natural blandness of cornflakes becomes a medical virtue . In his mind, taste is a stimulant, stimulation leads to arousal, arousal leads to sex. A more pronounced taste and that’s the tragedy, in any case the hand in the pants. The remarkable absence of flavor of cereal petals is not only good for your health, but it doesn’t give you any misplaced cravings.
Crusade against wanking
In his defense, so to speak, Kellogg is far from being the only one to rant against masturbation. At the end of a slow process which dates back to the modern era, the 19the century is undoubtedly THE century which most fought against what medicine and religion then considered as a “bad habit”, “the mother of all vices”, “the cause of all evil” and we move on. With a lot of circumlocution, this general disapproval which can make one smile today amuses no one in Kellogg’s time, with very concrete consequences for children and adolescents.
As evidenced by this astonishing passage taken from Mysteries of love – Philosophy and hygieneand work published in 1868 by the writer Alexandre Weill. “If by chance the vicious child touches himself, he should be beaten until he bleeds in front of his companions and never have pity for his pain, nor for his complaints, nor for his cries. Should the child die under correction, it is better for him to die at four or five years of age than to live as an idiot or a criminal. Because this vice idiotizes, stupidizes man.” Another authoritative doctor, Adam Clarke even writes that “neither plague, nor war, nor smallpox, nor any comparable disease have produced such disastrous results for humanity as the pernicious habit of onanism”. Just that.
Kellogg suggests using electrotherapy, or electric shocks, to stop children from touching themselves.
Throughout their works, moralists and doctors therefore recommend increasingly drastic measures. Kellogg is one of them. In 1877, he even published an entire work on the question of sex, Plain Facts about Sexual Life –356 pages for the first edition, four volumes and 900 pages in 1917. Convinced that masturbation is the root of all evil, destroys physical, mental and moral health, Kellogg sees it as the source of uterine cancer, urinary diseases, impotence, epilepsy, dementia. Incidentally, it also makes you deaf and blind, according to him.
This is obviously nonsense, but the worst is undoubtedly that Kellogg particularly targets children. Toddlers should be continually monitored to ensure they are not letting go. If unfortunately they indulge in vice, we start by bandaging their hands. If that’s not enough, we can install forms of cages or fences that prevent them from touching each other. But that’s not all. Kellogg suggests using electrotherapy, or electric shocks, to stop children from touching themselves. Finally, he recommends live circumcision for boys, the idea being that it will hurt them if they ever do it again.
For girls, it’s even worse. We rub our eyes to believe it, but Kellogg actually writes this: “For the female sex, the author found that the application ofcarbolic acid pure on the clitoris was an excellent way to calm any abnormal arousal. By comparison, the idea that we can “calm abnormal excitations” thanks to bowls of perfectly bland cornflakes suddenly seems preferable.
The moral question provokes a nice argument between John Harvey Kellogg and one of his brothers, Will. If John invented cornflakes, it was his younger brother who created the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company in Battle Creek in 1906. Much less puritanical than his older brother, Will is a born industrialist who understands the commercial potential of cornflakes, provided they can be made tastier. Against the advice of John, scandalized by the explosion of a major masturbatory risk, Will adds sugar to the recipe and makes the Kellogg’s box one of the world’s breakfast stars.
Source: www.slate.fr
