Pod Insights You're Dead to Me Kellogg Brothers (Radio Edit) About this episode Greg Jenner is joined in 19th-century America by historian Dr Vanessa Heggie and comedian Ed Byrne to learn all about the feuding Kellogg Brothers.
John and Will Kellogg were born into a large family in Battle Creek, Michigan, in the middle of the 1800s. Following a childhood marred by illness and death, John earned a medical degree before returning to run the Sanitorium – a health and wellness centre – in his hometown, where he prescribed a variety of treatments both sensible and surreal, including a vegetarian diet, fresh air and exercise, hydrotherapy, and regular enemas! He was soon joined in his wellness venture by his business-minded brother Will, and together they invented a breakfast cereal we still know and love today: cornflakes. But after years of John’s bullying, Will left to launch his own business: the Kellogg company.
This episode tells the story of these battling brothers and their food and wellness business ventures, exploring everything from their sibling relationship and the competing stories they tell about the invention of their most famous cereal, to John’s Seventh Day Adventist beliefs and his pioneering wife with her meat-free meal replacements.
This is a radio edit of the original podcast episode. For the full-length version, please look further back in the feed.
Hosted by: Greg Jenner
Research by: Charlotte Emily Edgeshaw
Written by: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow, Emma Nagouse, and Greg Jenner
Produced by: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow and Greg Jenner
Audio Producer: Steve Hankey
Production Coordinator: Gill Huggett
Senior Producer: Emma Nagouse
Executive Editor: Philip Sellars
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.
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1:09 Greg Jenner? Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author, and broadcaster. And today, we are grabbing our spoons and tucking into a big old bowl of cereal as we saunter back to 19th century America to learn all about the Kellogg Brothers. And to help us, we have two very special breakfast buddies. In history corner, she's Associate Professor in the History of Science and Medicine at the University of Birmingham's Department of Applied Health Science. You may have read her excellent book, Higher and Colder, on the history of extreme exploration. And you'll definitely remember her from our episodes on Victorian bodybuilding and the Northwest Passage. That's not one episode, it'll be weird if it was. It's Dr Vanessa Hegi. Welcome back Vanessa. It's great to be back. And in comedy corner, he's a comedian, actor, and writer.
1:53 Greg Jenner? You will know him from loads of television programmes, including Mock the Week, QI, Have I Got News For You, and Live at the Apollo. Plus, he's a staple of BBC Radio 4 shows like The Unbelievable Truth, The News Quiz, and The Infinite Monkey Cage. Maybe you've seen one of his amazing live tour shows, including the award-winning Tragedy Plus Time. That's right, it's Ed Byrne. Welcome to the show, Ed.
2:12 Speaker 05 Thank you very much indeed. I feel like I shouldn't even be here when I had toast for breakfast.
2:18 Greg Jenner? Ed, your first time on the show, we're delighted to have you in. First question I have to ask, contractually obligated. Are you a history fan, lover, admirer? Did you like it at school? Do you partake?
2:28 Speaker 05 Yeah, I mean, history at school, it's interesting. Like, as an Irish person, I have massive gaps in what I'm expected to know living in England. Like, anything to do with the British monarchy that people here just take for granted as knowing. I'm just absolutely out in the cold. And I have, and I have no notion of who came where. I mean, having numbers in the king's names helps. That even having lived now in Britain since the age of 18, I'm determined to keep it as a black spot in my knowledge.
3:01 Greg Jenner? Well, today we're talking about America, so you don't have to do any royal stuff. What do you know about breakfast cereal? Have you ever been a breakfast cereal guy?
3:08 Speaker 05 Yeah, totally.
3:09 Greg Jenner? Yeah.
3:09 Speaker 05 No, absolutely. And it's one of those ones where if I have even an ordinary breakfast cereal, like a crunching of cornflakes, I pat myself on the back for not having a cinnamon swirl.
3:23 Speaker 05 I do feel quite good about myself if I, if I, if I haven't had a fry up or basically cake.
3:32 Greg Jenner? So, what do you know?
3:39 Greg Jenner? This is the So What Do You Know? This is where I have a go at guessing what you, our lovely listener, might know about today's subject. And I think, like Ed, most of you are familiar with the Kellogg's brand. If you eat cereal like Ed, you're going to recognise their various popular products. Then their mascots that go with them, including Snap, Crackle and Pop. And the iconic Tony the Tiger, he's fine, he's fine. But I'm guessing the history of the Kellogg family specifically might be less familiar, unless you are a cereal cereal botherer or you've seen the 1994 movie, The Road to Wellville, starring Anthony Hopkins. So how did a family feud lead to the creation of such an iconic company? What wellness fads were popular in the late 19th century? And what has yogurt got to do with it? Let's find out.
4:21 Speaker 05 What's yogurt got to do with it? The Tina Turner classic that never was.
4:29 Greg Jenner? Dr Vanessa, let's start with the basics then. Who were the Kellogg family? And we've talked about the Kellogg brothers. Which brothers?
4:36 Speaker 06 So the two brothers we're talking about are John Harvey Kellogg, who was born on the 26th of February 1852, and his younger brother, Will Keith Kellogg, born on the 7th of April 1860. But they are part of a large family. Their dad, John Preston Kellogg, had five children with his first wife Mary Ann and then 11 with his second wife Anne Stanley. So John and Will are numbers 10 and 14 for John Preston out of his total of 16 kids.
5:02 Speaker 05 This is back in the day when you used to shoot out a lot of kids.
5:05 Speaker 06 Yes, especially with two marriages.
5:06 Speaker 05 You were gonna lose a couple anyway somewhere in the shop.
5:09 Speaker 06 Spoilers, that's coming up.
5:11 Greg Jenner? Yeah.
5:11 Speaker 06 Okay, so when John was born in 1852, the family are still trying to make it as farmers in Michigan. But shortly after his birth, they sold the farm, they bought a broom factory. And then in 1856, they moved with their new business to Battle Creek, a small town, which is where Will's born. And while John Harvey is charming and sociable, Will is not those things. He is not as outgoing. His family definitely thought he wasn't as smart as his older brother, John. And the brothers do not have a good relationship. John physically and verbally bullied his younger brother and he used his storytelling ability to get Will in trouble by telling tales on him when he'd done something wrong. Tragedy struck many times. Mary Ann Kellogg, John Prescott's first wife, dies of tuberculosis in 1841.
5:57 Speaker 06 And amongst the siblings, the direct siblings of John and Will, four of the 11 of them die, three of them in infancy and one of them is in their early teenage years. And even for those that survive, this is a childhood that's marked out by sickness.
6:09 Greg Jenner? John Harvey, as a boy, he claimed he had TB that he said lost his use of a lung?
6:14 Speaker 06 Yes, apparently he caught tuberculosis and it made basically one of his lungs, his left lung, completely non-functional for the rest of his life. And it certainly wasn't the only one of his diseases. I think perhaps more important to his later life, he really suffered from digestive disorders. He developed colitis.
6:30 Greg Jenner? And so he turned to religion. It's not the sort of classic American Baptist or Lutheran. It's something called the Seventh Day Adventist.
6:38 Speaker 06 Yeah, and religion was a huge part of the Kellogg family life. John Harvey's dad, John Preston, they all, there's a lot of familiar names here, so we're going to try and keep them apart. So John Preston was really-
6:48 Greg Jenner? Mr Kellogg.
6:49 Speaker 06 Mr Kellogg, Mr Kellogg Senior.
6:50 Greg Jenner? Yeah.
6:51 Speaker 06 Was close to the spiritual leaders of the Adventists, and that's Ellen and James White. Ellen is the person who's really important to shaping the faith because she's regarded as a prophetess. So she has visions that are basically the principles of Adventism. One of those is that the second coming is coming really soon, but the other is how to live a virtuous and healthy life, which is dietary advice, exercise advice, a diet of grains and vegetables, it's vegetarianism, it's no stimulating foods, nothing spicy, nothing fried, nothing pickled, no alcohol, no drugs, but also no wigs, no corsets, no tight dresses.
7:25 Greg Jenner? That's Saturday Night.
7:26 Speaker 05 Well, you're not supposed to eat those anyway.
7:27 Greg Jenner? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
7:28 Speaker 05 I never eat them.
7:30 Greg Jenner? You've never eaten a corset, Ed? You haven't lived. Delicious.
7:34 Speaker 05 Find them very binding.
7:37 Greg Jenner? All right. So John Harvey, as a sort of young boy growing into adolescence, you know, he believed that these indulgences, they would lead to what particular indulgence, Ed?
7:47 Speaker 05 Oh, now it's self-pleasure, no?
7:50 Greg Jenner? It is, yeah, very good.
7:51 Speaker 05 I mean, eventually all roads lead there.
7:57 Greg Jenner? Vanessa, how did Ellen White's spiritual beliefs and her visions influence little John Harvey Kellogg?
8:02 Speaker 06 His relationship with the Adventist Church and the faith does have its highs and lows over the rest of his life. He doesn't always stick entirely to her spiritual rules, but he definitely absorbs a lot of these ideas about pure, simple living.
8:14 Greg Jenner? What about formal education? We haven't really heard about like school.
8:17 Speaker 06 Kellogg Senior were not that keen on sending their children to school, and that's partly because if you think the second coming is coming, there's not much point in sending your kids to school.
8:24 Greg Jenner? Right.
8:25 Speaker 06 But they did get persuaded to send both of them. John starts attending at the age of 10. He's immediately identified as this gifted child. He starts to pursue a career in education, but Ellen White had a very different plan for him. And in 1872, she persuades him to go and pays for him to go and study medicine at Trall's Hygeiotherapeutic College.
8:43 Greg Jenner? Ooh.
8:43 Speaker 06 This is a college that we would probably today say is teaching alternative medicine, so hydrotherapy and things like that.
8:49 Greg Jenner? So John Harvey attended Dr. Trall's Hygeia Therapy Group, but he then has formal training later as well.
8:55 Speaker 06 He was not very impressed with the education he got from Dr. Trall. He thought it was a bit of a waste of time and a bit of a, he calls it a bogus diploma and he doesn't ever sort of mention it when he talks about his certificates later on. But he manages to persuade the Whites to continue funding his education and he actually goes and takes some courses in medicine at the University of Michigan. And then he manages to go to Bellevue Medical Hospital all the way out in New York City. And that's where he's taking as many classes in medicine, but also in medical sciences he can possibly manage.
9:20 Greg Jenner? Okay. So he's classically trained as a doctor.
9:22 Speaker 06 Yes, yes.
9:22 Greg Jenner? And he's alternatively trained. He's technically seen both sides. So Vanessa, while John Harvey Kellogg is off at med school, little Will is doing what?
9:32 Speaker 06 He's not treated as the brightest kid, but they do still send him to school. They still think it's a waste of time and probably even more for him because he does not do so well academically. Although I think to be fair, that might be because he's struggling having to go to school with also having a job. So from the age of six, he's working in his parents' broom factory.
9:46 Greg Jenner? Oh my word.
9:47 Speaker 06 And by 12, he's so good at it that he's become a factory floor supervisor for a team of other boys working on brooms.
9:53 Speaker 05 Yeah, but at the end of the day, nepo baby.
9:55 Speaker 06 Exactly.
9:57 Greg Jenner? That's the problem with the broom industry. I've always said it.
9:59 Speaker 05 It's sewn up. It is.
10:02 Speaker 06 Well, he may have been better than his dad, actually. At 14, they've got him out on the road selling stuff. And that's really where Will blooms. He is an excellent salesman, but he's also really good at the numbers and are good at the maths and good at the business studies and the logistics. So he manages to get to go to Parsons Business College in Kalamazoo, also in Michigan. And he, this is in 1880, and he therefore qualifies as a bookkeeper and an accountant. So business studies, basically.
10:24 Greg Jenner? Let's get back to John. What did he do with his fresh out of the cereal box medical degree? Did he go and practice medicine?
10:29 Speaker 06 So after his studies, he goes back to Battle Creek. And this is what Ellen and James White had planned for him all along. They get him to run their Western Health Reform Institute because it's struggling. That's why they sent him to study medicine in the first place. He reorganizes it, he reinvents it, he focuses on what he considers a healthy diet, as well as the hydrotherapy that they were already doing. In 1877, he renames it the Battle Creek Sanatorium. I'm saying sanatorium, not sanatorium. Yeah, because he wanted to distinguish it from the other institutes, but it quickly becomes nicknamed the SAN to save any effort and it thrives. And by 1880, he needs a new manager and so he turns and offers the job to his brother Will.
11:09 Greg Jenner? So John and Will are now working together at the Battle Creek Sanatorium, nicknamed the SAN. Will is in charge of the bookkeeping, he's the accountant, and John is in charge of the patients, I guess, the health staff, he's the doctor. Do the brothers now get on? They're now both in their twenties or thirties, I guess.
11:25 Speaker 06 No, things are still really bad between the two brothers. Will had to work at the SAN for seven years, doing 18-hour days, including work in Christmas, before he was allowed to take two weeks off for vacation. He's paid really badly and that's partly because the SAN is associated still with the church. So a lot of people are working voluntarily or for low wages because it's church work.
11:44 Speaker 05 Well, how well is John doing out of it at this point?
11:46 Speaker 06 Well, John technically isn't paying himself out of the SAN. He is paying himself out of the publications he's putting out and Will is running his publication company. So that's the other side of the business that they're also both working on.
11:57 Greg Jenner? He's a health author. He's kind of putting out pamphlets and so on.
12:00 Speaker 05 I don't, I don't, you can't know everything. But why is William doing this? William sounds like he's a very qualified business person. Why has he gone to work for no money with the brother that he hates and bullies him?
12:15 Speaker 06 It's harder to know because it's harder to get access to Will's personal papers than it is John Kellogg, who wrote a lot of his stuff down. The guess would be that it's still family loyalty and also possibly post-traumatic stress from being bullied. But this is what he's used to. This is the relationship he's used to.
12:30 Greg Jenner? It's sad, isn't it? Let's talk about the treatments you could receive at the SAN.
12:33 Speaker 06 By 1900, this is an incredibly large institution. It has about 700 patients, it has 1,000 staff, it has 400 acres of farmland, it has luxurious suites of patient wings, this is full modern plumbing, it's electric lighting, all of that sort of stuff. It also has a full hospital, operating theatre, scientific analysis laboratory, it has an orchestra, it has regular choir evenings for entertainment.
12:56 Greg Jenner? You've got to have an orchestra. You've got to have an orchestra.
12:58 Speaker 06 There's all the baths, there's the light baths, there's massive dining rooms, there is a full experimental kitchen and that's because the real focus here is on the diet. So it's being run on the Seventh Day Adventist principles. So that is vegetarian diet, vigorous exercise, no drugs, no alcohol, no tobacco, no tight corsets, no sex and... What John thinks is really important is that the food mustn't stagnate and stifle you, you mustn't have rotting food in your body, it has to pass through really quickly. So you eat this particular diet.
13:27 Speaker 05 And yet spices weren't allowed.
13:28 Greg Jenner? Yeah.
13:29 Speaker 06 That would make it easier.
13:30 Speaker 05 Yeah.
13:31 Greg Jenner? Act as an accelerant.
13:32 Speaker 06 Yeah.
13:33 Greg Jenner? Yoga enemas.
13:34 Speaker 06 Yoga enemas, if it doesn't come out fast enough, aim for four bowel movements a day. And if all else fails, vibration to get you moving.
13:41 Greg Jenner? And chew your food 40 times, is it Fletcherism, this thing?
13:43 Speaker 06 Yes, so that's named after the health guru Horace Fletcher. So you have to chew your food, each bite of food, at least 40 times to sort of predigest it before it gets into your stomach.
13:51 Greg Jenner? Shoots straight through. Ed, would you have voluntarily gone to one of these health farms?
13:56 Speaker 05 No, I'm a nightmare just even thinking about it. And I'm, you know, this is going to go out, you know, in the morning on Radio 4, I'm not going to go into detail on the thing that really puts me off the most. But yeah, vegetarian diet, nothing.
14:11 Greg Jenner? I mean, some of this is kind of sensible science and exercise diet, whatever, good. And some of this is bonkers stuff. We have to obviously talk about John Harvey Kellogg's pretty nasty views, which are fairly typical of the era, but he was particularly keen on eugenics and he went further than some.
14:29 Speaker 06 Yeah, he was a supporter of eugenics and this can seem confusing to some people because obviously he's also advocating all these lifestyle diet, the nurture side of nature and nurture, the changes. And also because the SAN itself could look like quite a racially progressive institution. There's no real racial segregation there. He had some very high profile clients, including the abolitionist surgeon of truth, but he also had African American nurses and doctors working and training there. But he also believed in the supremacy of the white race and he thought that we should be tactically breeding better men and women, and these are his words, like horses, cows and pigs. So he organises and hosts a series of national conferences on race betterment at the SAN.
15:09 Speaker 06 The first of these is in 1913 and he's a strong advocate of what we call positive eugenics, but that's where you try and encourage some people to have more kids, but also supported negative eugenics, which is where you try and stop people from having children.
15:21 Speaker 05 Are you going to come to me now for my hilarious take on that?
15:24 Greg Jenner? Yeah, Ed, if you could just follow that up with a hilarious banger, that'd be great. No, I mean, obviously it's, you know, there's an awful lot of eugenicists in this time of history, some of them quite progressive in other ways. So we're talking about food innovators in several ways, which means we need to talk about the breakfast cereal market because so far we haven't really talked about breakfast. And that's why we're here. We're here for breakfast. How, why did the brothers break into the, yeah, the cereal market?
15:49 Speaker 06 So they have an experimental kitchen at the san, which is really useful for them. And John's story, and we have to again, take it with a pinch of salt, is that when he's at medical school in New York.
15:58 Speaker 05 Is a pinch of salt allowed?
15:59 Greg Jenner? No, no, no.
16:00 Speaker 06 A sprinkling of.
16:01 Greg Jenner? A sprinkling of oats.
16:04 Speaker 06 I don't work in.
16:04 Speaker 05 I don't think we're going to popularise that as a new phrase. He's going to take it with a sprinkling of oats.
16:10 Speaker 06 So John's story about why he got into cereals was that he's looking for no cook breakfast, basically.
16:15 Greg Jenner? Yeah.
16:16 Speaker 06 He is not the only one. There are a lot of doctors and entrepreneurs are all trying to think about this same sort of easy breakfast morning product. That's also healthy and made of grains and things like that. His key inspiration is probably granular and granular is this baked whole wheat flour crispy bits that have to be soaked overnight to become edible. So they're not really quick cook. So John and Will are kind of experimenting with different sorts of flours and grains to try and make an easier version of this. And eventually they have this mix of wheat and oat and corn. They bake at high temperatures, they crumble it up. It still needs soaking for a couple of hours, so it's not immediate, but it's still slightly better.
16:52 Speaker 05 Still less hassle than chia seeds.
16:55 Greg Jenner? So how do we get cornflakes? Because I know there are multiple stories of how they come up with it.
17:00 Speaker 06 Okay, so the key step for cornflake making here, I'm not going to do too much science, but there's a little bit, which is tempering. So you soak this, whatever you're using and then you boil it and then you sort of put it into a sheet. And it's that drying out as a sheet that means that the moisture in it is evened out and it becomes easy to bake and flake. So that's the essential thing.
17:16 Greg Jenner? Bake and flake.
17:18 Speaker 06 John's story, happy accident. He's playing about at home, gets called away to the san, forgets what he's working on, leaves it overnight. And when he comes back and tries out, he suddenly realises, ah, a miracle has happened and now it flakes really easily. And that's the discovery of how you make cornflakes. Will says actually it was the two of them deliberately working on it in the experimental kitchen. And that the mash was left for a lot longer and had become mouldy, but they didn't want to waste it. So they tried flaking it, baking and flaking it, and then they realised it worked really well. And then John wrote up a whole series of experiments for him to try and Will put in 120 hour weeks in order to try and perfect this particular method.
17:54 Speaker 05 I'm going to go with the second one there. I'm going to go with William's version of events.
17:58 Greg Jenner? You're going to go with the brothers spending hundreds of hours just. I mean, that's how most foods are made, right?
18:05 Speaker 05 I mean, that's oftentimes how my dinner is made. Many, many hours spent trying to work on it.
18:13 Greg Jenner? Okay, Vanessa, do we have a sort of instant breakfast revolution in America?
18:18 Speaker 06 Actually, yes. It is a massive boom time for cereal entrepreneurs, basically. So Battle Creek becomes this hub for cereal production. By 1900, there's over 100 companies there, all trying to make cereals. Some of them are innovating, some of them are just copying each other, some of them are literally stealing each other's ideas.
18:34 Greg Jenner? And they have quite good names.
18:36 Speaker 06 Yeah, so the ones actually in Battle Creek, some of them are familiar, Grape Nuts are going to come out of Battle Creek, but also the first really sugary cereals, like Maple Flakes, which are made with maple syrup, very sweet. But outside of Battle Creek, there's ones which have very forceful names, like, well, Force, Vim, things like that.
18:52 Greg Jenner? Zest.
18:52 Speaker 06 Zest, yes.
18:53 Greg Jenner? Would you eat Vim?
18:56 Speaker 05 No, no, not, didn't Vim become a, like, that was like a bleach, wasn't it?
19:01 Greg Jenner? Maybe, maybe.
19:01 Speaker 05 That feels, I feel like that was.
19:04 Greg Jenner? But the most crucial thing we have to say, of course, is they were making these with wheat.
19:07 Speaker 06 Yeah.
19:07 Greg Jenner? And then Will goes, hang on a second, corn.
19:10 Speaker 06 Will really wants to go for nationwide advertising and getting this product out there, and John says, no, I'm not interested.
19:15 Speaker 05 It was just that wheat at the time was the dominant sort of crop.
19:18 Speaker 06 Ah, so, no. Will wants them to switch, and when we say he wants them to switch to corn, and we mean maize, just to be emphatic, it's American corn, not British corn. So Will wants them to switch to corn because it's easier to handle, and it's sweeter, and it just tastes better than wheat. And John says no, because he thinks wheat is really healthy, and that corn is not healthy.
19:39 Speaker 05 Because corn tastes nicer than wheat, and therefore you just, yeah. My, my, my wife has a term for things that taste like they're good for you. It's like, tastes very worthy. That's her subtle way of saying, I don't like the taste of this, but I'm sure it's good for me.
19:55 Greg Jenner? Could we launch Worthy Flakes?
19:57 Speaker 05 Worthy Flakes, yeah.
19:58 Greg Jenner? I'm getting a sense here that the brothers are still at loggerheads. Are they still able to work together?
20:03 Speaker 06 No. Will decides he has enough, and he leaves his job at the sand in 1901. Unfortunately, six months later, the sand burns down, and he gets roped back into the rebuild, the massive rebuild that, that John has planned.
20:15 Greg Jenner? Poor Will, he was free.
20:16 Speaker 06 He was free, and then he was sucked right back in again.
20:18 Greg Jenner? Just one more job.
20:19 Speaker 05 By the time I think I'm out, they pulled me back in.
20:23 Speaker 05 How do we know he wasn't the one who burnt it down? Oh, hello. He's definitely got motive.
20:29 Speaker 06 There are many rumours, but it was probably the really complex electric plant just had a bit of a spark.
20:33 Greg Jenner? Okay, so it burned down, Will came back in, but then he goes on his own. Will launches his own company, which will become known as the company that is now famous as the Kellogg's Company. But that's not what he calls it to begin with.
20:43 Speaker 06 No, so in 1906 February, he launches the Battle Creek Toasted Cornflake Company, really catchy name.
20:49 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah, I mean, I could see why he didn't stick with that.
20:51 Speaker 06 He changes the name of the food he's making to the Sanitas Toasted Cornflake, to Corn Crisp with a K, and then finally Kellogg Cornflakes. And then he changes the name in the company to match it in 1909 to Kellogg Toasted Cornflake Company, which becomes the Kellogg Company in 1922.
21:06 Greg Jenner? Mm hmm. Quite a lot of rebrands.
21:07 Speaker 06 Yes.
21:08 Speaker 05 He landed on eventually just his own name as the brand name.
21:11 Speaker 06 Mm hmm.
21:12 Speaker 05 Was that, had his name become, because of the Sanatorium and stuff like that, had his name become a famous name? Or did the name become famous after the cereal became manufactured?
21:23 Greg Jenner? Great question, right?
21:24 Speaker 06 So the Kellogg name was known as associated with health food products and with the San, and with all the publications that John was putting out. But their food company was called the Sanitas Company, not the Kellogg Food Company. And this is a source of a lot of the conflict that they had. So it would have the Kellogg name on it, but that wasn't the brand name they were using.
21:42 Greg Jenner? Yeah, and so, I mean, John being a super chill guy, as he was, he reacted to his brother sort of launching a rival business. In typical fashion, he sued him.
21:51 Speaker 05 For using what is also his own name, right?
21:54 Greg Jenner? Yeah, he sued him for control of the family name.
21:57 Speaker 06 Mm hmm.
21:57 Speaker 05 Right.
21:58 Greg Jenner? What legal framework does he have there? Because Kellogg, Will's called Kellogg, he's allowed to use his name.
22:02 Speaker 05 Yeah, exactly.
22:03 Speaker 06 Yeah, a lot of it is to do with the use of the signature on the box and the branding names. And basically, the two brothers get kind of locked into this series of suit and counter suit against each other. And what I think we can probably call some quite petty recriminations. So John starts copying Will's advertising style. And then when John starts making bran cereal, Will brings out all bran and bran flakes in response. Will wins the case out of an out of court settlement in 1911, so he has the right to use the Kellogg. Brand, but John Harvey doesn't stop with this process and brings yet another suit against him. And then finally, it's not until nineteen seventeen when Will actually succeeds in fully winning back the entire brand name.
22:43 Speaker 06 He can use Kellogg and his brother cannot use Kellogg in the branding anywhere at all. So he wins out in the end.
22:49 Greg Jenner? Yeah.
22:49 Speaker 05 And so if John hadn't sued William, he probably still could have used his name.
22:53 Greg Jenner? Yeah, yeah, that's true.
22:55 Speaker 06 That was the agreement they reached sort of in nineteen eleven and but he continued to pursue terrorists about it.
23:00 Greg Jenner? And Will. How are you feeling about all that bullying now, John? Yeah, exactly. I feel at this point I should probably do a sort of impartial BBC voice and chase, just say other breakfast cereals are available. Because my producer.
23:11 Speaker 05 Unfortunately, we have chosen to concentrate on one particular company.
23:14 Greg Jenner? Okay, where does our story end then for the battling brothers, Vanessa? You said that they're suing and countersuing and eventually Will wins the right to have the Kellogg name and his brand. Do they ever reconcile? Do they ever get together at Christmas and go, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I love you really?
23:28 Speaker 06 Unfortunately not. There isn't a happy ending here. John gradually gives up control of the sand through the nineteen twenties. It's sold off to the US government in nineteen forty two and he dies in Battle Creek in nineteen forty three. At the grand old age, it has to be said, of ninety one. So some of his lifestyle was very effective. He leaves his entire estate to the Race Betterment Foundation.
23:47 Greg Jenner? Oh, John, come on.
23:50 Speaker 05 Okay, that bit's not a happy ending.
23:51 Greg Jenner? No.
23:52 Speaker 05 I mean, for those of us who see John as the bad guy and William as the good guy, that you could argue that their lack of, of, of, um. What's the word I'm looking for? Their lack of reconciliation is actually, you know, that is a good thing.
24:05 Greg Jenner? It's certainly helpful that one of them is like, you know, just still team Eugenics all the way. And the other guy is giving money to charity and genuinely being quite a useful industrialist.
24:14 Speaker 06 Yeah, because, I mean, Will spends lots of time at his massive horse farm in ranch in California, but he also dies at the same age. Ninety one in Battle Creek. He had set up a philanthropic organisation about twenty years earlier, which is the WK Kellogg Foundation. And he leaves all of his estate to that. And it's a foundation that particularly looks at, um. Challenges facing children and childhood development and children's charities. And obviously Kellogg's is still here today.
24:39 Speaker 05 I'd like to think that in, you know, as a counterpoint to the eugenics, that he ran his horse farm in a way where he didn't breed, he just let them fall in love with each other. He didn't put any thought whatsoever into breeding better, stronger horses. He just let the horses just find their own partners.
24:54 Greg Jenner? Yeah, so there we go. So that's the end of the family story. And as you say, the corporation obviously is still going pretty strong.
25:00 Speaker 03 The nuance window.
25:06 Greg Jenner? Time now for the nuance window. This is the part of the show where Ed and I sit quietly for two minutes while Dr. Vanessa takes to the factory floor to tell us something we need to know about the Kellogg brothers. My stopwatch is ready. Take it away, Vanessa.
25:17 Speaker 06 So I want to introduce a concept to try and understand the Kellogg's and the Sam, which is techno-solutionism. That is faith in technological innovations to solve all our problems, including our social problems. It might seem counterintuitive for John Harvey Kellogg and the Sam because they're part of this broader health reform movement. It tends to talk about nature rather than necessarily science. It's a response to anxieties about modern life in industrialized capitalist cities. There's been very rapid social change. People aren't living, eating, working the same way that they had even a generation ago. The move from rural to city living had disconnected people from their food ways. They don't know where the food's being grown, how it's being transported, if the packet is truthful about what's inside it. And although we're having fewer deaths, perhaps from things like cholera and plague and smallpox, we're now having new mysterious modern diseases, particularly amongst the middle classes,
26:01 Speaker 06 particularly amongst those who work in offices. Headaches, digestive disorders, fatigue, stress, anxiety. And modern medicine doesn't have at this point a lot to offer to those people. And that's where the doctors, health reformers and entrepreneurs step in, not to reform society, but to offer these lifestyle changes, these new diets, these new regimes, these new health resorts to deal with these problems. A lot of them use a rhetoric not only of naturalness, but also the past. So looking nostalgically back to how we used to live a generation ago, but also even further, looking to anatomy, biology, evolution to say how we should live and how we should live in a healthy way. The past will cure modernity. But that relationship is complicated when you bring the science in because science and technology can make society too fast, it can process our food, but it can also
26:46 Speaker 06 enable us to make a lovely, healthy, digestible cornflake and we can have now sun baths in the middle of winter. So people like John Harvey Kellogg don't want us to go back to that pre-industrial life. They don't want us to live like the people he called primitive savages. Instead, he wants to use technology to solve these problems. Our stomachs can't handle modern life, so let's use technology to predigest our food for us and then we can move through the modern world, perhaps more like a machine hybrid, a cyborg than a natural animal for this new, exciting, modern world.
27:17 Greg Jenner? Amazing. Two minutes on the dot. Look at that. Bang on. Thank you so much. Techno solutionism. Interesting stuff, isn't it?
27:24 Speaker 05 Yeah, I mean, I have to say, I'm someone who, I'm more so into eating now, but as a kid, I just found eating food was just something I didn't, something I had to do and I never wanted to do. I never had much of that. So I've always dreamed and looked forward to this future where we would have pills for breakfast.
27:38 Greg Jenner? Oh, yeah.
27:39 Speaker 05 You know, and I'm still, I'm more annoyed by, by that than, than rocket packs. We all thought we'd be flying around in jet packs.
27:47 Greg Jenner? Yeah. Where's my hoverboard?
27:48 Speaker 05 Exactly.
27:48 Greg Jenner? Yeah. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Vanessa. If you want more from Vanessa, check out our episode on Victorian bodybuilding and the, what, on the Northwest Passage, both fascinating. And for more American entrepreneurs, why not listen to our episode on P T Barnum? He was an absolute monster. Or Madame C J Walker. She wasn't a monster. And remember, if you've enjoyed the podcast, please share the show with your friends, subscribe to Your Dead to Me on BBC Sounds. I just want to say a huge thank you to our guests. In history corner, we have the fantastic Dr Vanessa Hegi from the University of Birmingham. Thank you, Vanessa.
28:16 Speaker 06 Thank you for having me back.
28:17 Greg Jenner? It was a pleasure. And in comedy corner, what a debut, we have the exceptional Ed Byrne. Thank you, Ed. And to you lovely listener, join me next time as we rummage through the pantry of history for another delicious box of facts. But for now, I'm off to go and sue my brother for control of the family name. Bye.
28:39 Speaker 07 Hello, I'm Brian Cox.
28:40 Speaker 00 I'm Robin Ince and we're back for a new series of The Infinite Monkey Cage. We have our 201st extravaganza, where we're going to talk about how animals emote when around trains and tunnels, or something like that, I'm not entirely sure.
28:54 Speaker 07 We're doing one on potatoes.
28:55 Speaker 00 Of course we're doing one on potatoes, you love potatoes.
28:58 Speaker 07 I know, but...
28:58 Speaker 00 Yeah, you love chips, you love mash.
28:59 Speaker 07 I'll only enjoy it if it's got curry sauce on it.
29:01 Speaker 00 We've also got techno fossils, moths versus butterflies, and a history of light, that'll do, won't it?
29:07 Speaker 07 Listen first on BBC Sounds.
29:16 Speaker 08 Welcome to The Haunted Library. Join me, Colin Morgan, as I read Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. A story of science and ambition, loneliness and longing, and what it truly means to be human. Listen to The Haunted Library wherever you get your podcasts, or find us on YouTube.
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