Quack king

“Corn Flake Kings: The Kellogg Brothers” is a documentary about – wait for it – Kellogg´s Corn Flakes, or rather the very strange pre-history of this quintessential American breakfast food.

The roots of Corn Flakes go back to John Harvey Kellogg (1852-1943), a quackish medical doctor who had originally been a member of the Seventh Day Adventist Church. J H Kellogg founded the Battle Creek Sanatorium in Battle Creek, Michigan, where he and his staff offered a wide range of positively weird cures, including “hydrotherapy” and sexual abstinence. In all fairness to Kellogg, the level of medicine and health care in the United States (and the rest of the world) was still dismally low at the time, and he did know *some* things, such as the necessity of exercise or the need for strict hygiene in operation rooms.

J H Kellogg´s younger brother Will Keith Kellogg worked as an underpaid secretary to the older Kellogg (whose behavior progressively became more and more eccentric) until he had enough and decided to strike out on his own. Will Keith´s salvation came when he added sugar to the cereal flakes invented by John Harvey. The resulting product, later known as Kellogg´s Corn Flakes, took the local community by storm, then the rest of America, and…well, I think you had it for breakfast yourself just this morning!

The break between the two brothers became life long, and in a parallel development, John Harvey was also expelled by the Adventists. (The documentary says very little about this, however.) Despite everything, John Harvey continued to promote his ideas about health until his death, a typical true believer, while W K Kellogg became a successful businessman and philanthropist (founder of the Kellogg Foundation).

Overall, a quite interesting documentary, similar in some ways to “Potions or Poisons”, which also takes us to the crazy “quack fad” period in US history. (Reviewed by me elsewhere on this blog.)