Kellogg’s: The Disturbing Reason Corn Flakes Exist

This episode contains adult topics and themes Ever wondered how the world's most popular cereal ended up in your breakfast bowl? The story behind Cornflakes is stranger than you'd think, meet John Harvey Kellogg, the man whose obsession with gut health and moral purity accidentally changed the way the world eats breakfast. 0:00 Intro 5:40 Two truths and a lie 7:30 The religious pipeline 10:40 Picking the doctor 13:35 The San 17:45 Gut Health 24:34 The anti masturbation crusade 29:41 The accidental invention 35:11 The rival next door 37:26 The brothers split 43:52 A note on more dark stuff 46:06 The end 50:42 Two truths and a lie Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Rob, what did you have for breakfast, mate?

• 0:03Speaker 01

  I had a wrap which consisted of two boiled eggs, some cherry tomatoes and some hot sauce. I thought I had avocado, but we ate it the night before.

• 0:13Speaker 00

  That's good. Did you make that at home?

• 0:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I did.

• 0:15Speaker 00

  That's nice. That's cafe stuff.

• 0:17Speaker 01

  It's pretty good. I've figured out the timing of putting my eggs on to boil, jumping into the shower, getting out and ready to go.

• 0:24Speaker 00

  You've got a system. Jesus, I'm feeling really exposed right now because I don't have a system. Like every day is a mystery and a bit of a shanking if I'm honest. Kids get toast. I don't know what I'm doing. Wife's getting ready in the shower and I'm at sea. I don't know what I'm doing.

• 0:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, a lot of it does rely on the patience of a two-year-old. And if I can go, hey, play with this truck for the next six minutes and don't move, then we're on.

• 0:47Speaker 00

  Then we're right. I mean, it's one of those things that, you know, it's universal. Everybody has to have something in their tummy, but I don't know. It's different for everyone. And I actually asked that question a weirdly huge amount. You know, what did you have for breakfast? When someone's nervous in front of a microphone or a camera, it's kind of the first thing I ask and I do it for two reasons. First, I need to check the audio levels. And second, it kind of helps distract them and get them out of their head, I find. And it kind of works, stops their thought process dead. And it sort of reminds them that it's just a chat, nothing to worry about. This is if they're on TV or radio. And when I ask people that question, I cannot tell you how many times the answer comes back, cornflakes. It's absolutely still a thing.

• 1:29Speaker 00

  I've never really been a cornflakes guy, but Rob, today, I'm ready.

• 1:36Speaker 01

  Ready to go.

• 1:36Speaker 00

  I'm ready.

• 1:37Speaker 01

  Ready to go.

• 1:38Speaker 00

  We're both absolutely in.

• 1:40Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:41Speaker 00

  We're ready. We've got the cornflakes. You're going to hear crunching as we go. We don't want any scary masturbation mishaps.

• 1:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is just some atmos sounds wherever I'm just shaking of cornflakes.

• 1:51Speaker 00

  I think that's important. Every so often, if you could just rattle that.

• 1:54Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:54Speaker 00

  According to Howard Markell's book, The Kellogg's, The Battling Brothers of Battle Creek, 350 million bowls of cornflakes are eaten every single day. And almost none of the people eating them know anything about how it started. Today I get to tell you, which is so exciting because it's such a crazy story. It involves a deeply religious doctor who wanted people to stop masturbating, a health retreat that routinely prescribed yogurt enemas, among other things. One of the first times we saw health marketing used at a really industrial scale, and the invention of mass-produced, cheap, easy-to-prepare food.

• 2:36Speaker 00

  And Rob, I reckon people have stopped listening because they're stuck on the masturbation and yogurt stuff.

• 2:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, somewhere in the world, Chris, someone has sat down to listen to this podcast and they're probably eating some yogurt and they've now stopped. They're looking at the yogurt, they're rethinking their life.

• 2:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:52Speaker 01

  Hopefully no one's having a wank right now, but the yogurt, very plausible.

• 2:55Speaker 00

  I don't know. I don't know what people are into. Hopefully they're not because that's not on theme for this episode.

• 3:01Speaker 01

  No.

• 3:01Speaker 00

  Definitely not.

• 3:02Speaker 01

  Definitely not.

• 3:03Speaker 00

  Just no, we're not talking about this story only because it's weird. We're talking about it because it explains something enormous about the modern economy. Specifically, the way health is marketed and sold to us. Kellogg's, I mean, it doesn't really sit at the centre of that world anymore. It kind of became a very conventional and pretty unhealthy food company a long time ago. But when you understand what Kellogg's did, you understand that whole space better. And it all starts with a man named John Harvey Kellogg, born in Michigan, 1852. He's the one who becomes probably the world's most vocal anti-wanker. Rob, I've been looking forward to this episode for ages.

• 3:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm learning a lot about you, Chris, just from this intro. But I think it is worth pointing out to our foreign listeners that the term wanking is a slang term for masturbation here in Australia, UK, New Zealand. For our US friends, you might say jerking off or jacking off.

• 4:03Speaker 00

  This is important, isn't it?

• 4:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:04Speaker 00

  Get the terms down.

• 4:05Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 4:06Speaker 00

  You might even hear some of this sort of stuff entering this.

• 4:09Speaker 01

  It's during the lingo, yeah. So it's important that everyone understands what we're speaking about here.

• 4:13Speaker 00

  I can't wait to get into this story, but we've got to hear from some of our sponsors first.

• 4:17Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 4:19Speaker 00

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• 5:04Speaker 00

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• 5:38Speaker 00

  First things first, two truths and a lie. Kellogg's Edition. I'm going to give you three facts. Two are real, one isn't. See which one of them you think is the lie now and then see if you change your mind by the end. Okay, fact number one or lie number one. John Harvey Kellogg reportedly spent his wedding night writing an essay about the dangers of sex on his wedding night.

• 6:01Speaker 01

  What a buzzkill.

• 6:02Speaker 00

  What, what an absolute way to spend your wedding night, if it's true.

• 6:05Speaker 01

  If it's true. And like, you think about this is definitely an era where premarital sex was probably frowned upon.

• 6:11Speaker 00

  Very much.

• 6:11Speaker 01

  So you can imagine for this young woman, this lady that tonight's the big night and it's like, oh, John, let's do it. He's like, no, no, I'm, I'm busy. I'm in my study.

• 6:20Speaker 00

  Post marital sex. No, I gotta write this essay. This isn't gonna write it.

• 6:23Speaker 01

  This is not the right, the right time for this.

• 6:25Speaker 00

  That's, that's number one. Number two, John Harvey Kellogg believed a healthy human should produce four to five odorless bowel movements per day.

• 6:34Speaker 01

  Can he tell this to my son, please?

• 6:38Speaker 00

  Four to five is right. Odorless, not so right.

• 6:40Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 6:41Speaker 00

  Okay. Lie or truth, number three. John Harvey Kellogg died in poverty, having lost the rights to the Kellogg name in court. Interesting. Keep those in mind. What do you reckon, Rob?

• 6:53Speaker 01

  I really don't know. And I will say that we're episode three now. The first two episodes, I had a bit of an idea already. I'm in the complete darkness with this one. I have absolutely no idea. I feel really bad for number three, so I hope that didn't happen for him. I think one is just hilarious, but two seems like, okay, maybe there's some sort of, you know, pseudoscience logic going on here. So I'm going to pick number two today.

• 7:17Speaker 00

  Right, okay. He's a doctor in the mid 19th century. Maybe that's plausible. I get it.

• 7:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:21Speaker 00

  But I'm excited because this gives you a bit of an idea about how wacky this story can get.

• 7:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:25Speaker 00

  Cause something, there's some true stuff in there. Here we go. The whole thing starts in a town called Battle Creek in Michigan in the 1860s. It's a flat midwestern town and it's really only famous, pretty much. I don't want to offend anyone from Battle Creek, but it's kind of really only famous today for being the birthplace of Kellogg's. And that was really a consequence of a very specific religious movement. John Harvey Kellogg, and I'm calling him John Harvey a lot here because it seems like half the people in this massive family are called John. His parents were early members of a new church called the Seventh Day Adventists, which is still a huge global church with about 25 million people in it, Rob. It's big.

• 8:07Speaker 01

  It is. It is. It is big. Would you like to know a fun fact about?

• 8:11Speaker 00

  Yes, please.

• 8:11Speaker 01

  The Seventh Day Adventist Church? So I had a little look at this in preparation for the episode today. And as you do, when you start any good research, you start a Wikipedia. Scroll down. Now, the president of the Seventh Day Adventists, would you like to know what his name is?

• 8:25Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 8:25Speaker 01

  His name is Erton Kohler.

• 8:28Speaker 00

  No.

• 8:29Speaker 01

  He has the umlaut on the O.

• 8:31Speaker 00

  Oh, he does. Oh, we lost the umlaut years ago. Erton.

• 8:34Speaker 01

  Long lost relation, Chris.

• 8:35Speaker 00

  Look at this guy.

• 8:36Speaker 01

  We could hit him up. He could come on the show.

• 8:38Speaker 00

  Let's get it. No, he's a friend of the show.

• 8:40Speaker 01

  Friend of the show.

• 8:40Speaker 00

  Oh, my goodness. I'm genuinely flummoxed. I didn't know that you were going to hit me with that. Erton, Erton, Carlo Cola?

• 8:49Speaker 01

  Carlos. Erton Carlos Cola.

• 8:51Speaker 00

  Carlos Cola.

• 8:52Speaker 01

  That episode is dedicated to you, my friend.

• 8:54Speaker 00

  This one goes out to you, Erton, and I hope I don't offend you too much, because here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna do a really quick and nasty, here's what the Seventh Day Adventist Church is all about. It's built around the second coming of Jesus and a lot of the guidelines around clean living and purity of lifestyle in religion. They're really baked into this one. It actually grew out of an unsuccessful religious movement. The previous version was led by a guy named William Miller, and he predicted that Jesus would return to earth on October 22, 1844, which is super specific. And spoiler, he didn't return. The event is literally known as the Great Disappointment. So, you know, they learned their lessons.

• 9:38Speaker 00

  The Seventh Day Adventists came along a few years later. They believed that Jesus would return, but they just didn't put a specific date on it this time, which, you know, they learnt. That's smart. So the basic idea was be on your best behaviour at all times, because you don't know when Jesus is coming back.

• 9:53Speaker 01

  Fair enough.

• 9:54Speaker 00

  Fair enough. They had some other ideas too. The name itself, Seventh Day, because they believed that Saturday was the Sabbath, not Sunday. They were very anti-alcohol, they were anti-tobacco, they were pro-vegetarian. And they held a belief that set them apart from most other churches at the time. That was physical health is a spiritual responsibility. And that last one is really key to this story. The leader of the church was Ellen G. White. And in 1866, she decides that she wants to open something called the Western Health Reform Institute in Battle Creek as a way to combine the religious and the health messages. And by all accounts, it was a, you know, it was a bit of a disaster.

• 10:38Speaker 00

  It was like a big hospital. It's a kind of a health retreat type of combination, but it was maybe a bit underfunded. It was pretty empty, it was losing money, it was a bit preachy. Massive building though. Unfortunately, there were kind of probably only about 20 or so patients rattling around inside it at any given time. So it wasn't doing well. But Ellen White wanted it to succeed, so she started looking for someone to run it better. And she picked this young guy named John Harvey Kellogg. As for why him? Well, by all accounts, he was pretty impressive. He was confident and he was doing quite well as a kid in the church. And he did well to stand out at all because his father,

• 11:21Speaker 00

  John Preston Kellogg, had five kids with his first wife and 11 kids with his second, and John Harvey was just one of those, part of this massive family. And they were reusing names all over the place. Two of his siblings died young, Emma and Preston, and they just kind of gave those names to future siblings, which seems like it lacks a bit of sentimentality, Rob?

• 11:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:46Speaker 00

  I don't know about that.

• 11:46Speaker 01

  I think for us in modern Western society, where we obviously do place such a high value on life, this is pretty harsh. But this is probably a time where contraception probably doesn't really exist, or if not much, and infant mortality might be quite high. So, you know, when you're having families this young, it's like, well, I only know a dozen names anyway. So.

• 12:07Speaker 00

  16 kids.

• 12:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:08Speaker 00

  You're gonna, maybe you've got to start reusing names. I mean, his name is John Preston Kellogg.

• 12:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:13Speaker 00

  He's naming kids John and Preston like crazy. He's just, here are the names that are on the shelf.

• 12:18Speaker 01

  Well, look, it's better than George Foreman, who has, I think, half a dozen sons who are all called George. So, you know, as you do.

• 12:25Speaker 00

  As you do. It's a good name. Anyway, John, he was a clear standout. And Ellen White was apparently, quote, "impressed by his intellect, spirit and drive." He was in his early teens when she gave him a job as a printing apprentice so that he could help make the Seventh Day Adventist literature. By the age of 16, he was already editing the church's monthly magazine. Now, Ellen decided to invest more in him at this age. So she plucked him out of there, and she started funding his medical training. He finished all that at the age of 24, and he was immediately appointed superintendent of that health reform, the Reform Institute, in 1876 at 24. Which, I mean, I don't know, that is impressive.

• 13:08Speaker 00

  At 24, I was totally incapable of leading or doing much of anything.

• 13:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I wasn't doing much. I was backpacking in South America, just trying to find myself, you know?

• 13:18Speaker 00

  That's good.

• 13:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:19Speaker 00

  And you, did you find yourself?

• 13:20Speaker 01

  I found beers everywhere. It was weird. I don't know. Every town I turned up in, they're like Cervais.

• 13:24Speaker 00

  And I was like, see? Look, if you guys are offering.

• 13:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm here.

• 13:28Speaker 00

  24 year old me says, yeah.

• 13:29Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Why not?

• 13:30Speaker 00

  Okay. So, you know, for him though, the pressure was on to turn this whole thing around. And it's kind of exactly what he does. He is really, really good at it. The building is five stories tall. It's incredible. And he wants renovations and extensions straight away. And he convinces the church to fund upgrades and pretty soon it's even better than it was. Wraparound verandas, different suites for different things like hydrotherapy. Apparently had 50 different types of baths. Every room had hot and cold water and gas lighting, which is kind of not bad for the late 19th century. So word starts to get out and people start coming in much bigger numbers. And that lets Kellogg keep on improving it.

• 14:11Speaker 00

  He also paid staff minimum wages in exchange for board and food, which, you know, that's pretty rough. But it kept his costs down. After a while, he brought in his brother to Will Keith Kellogg as his assistant. Also paid him peanuts and worked him really hard. In fact, there are reports that he worked for seven years without a break, other than the Sabbath, of course.

• 14:33Speaker 01

  Keith Kellogg would be a really good name for a mascot. Like, you know, all the other Kellogg cereals, they have like a tiger or a toucan or something. But they should have one that has Keith Kellogg and he's just like a guy, middle management, who has some fibre problems.

• 14:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, wears a bow tie or something.

• 14:48Speaker 01

  Perfect.

• 14:48Speaker 00

  Totally. Fun fact, the cockerel on the Kellogg's box, right there, Cornelius.

• 14:56Speaker 01

  Cornelius, the cornflake.

• 14:57Speaker 00

  I reckon Keith. I think you're right.

• 14:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, let's do, let's, let's rename it Keith.

• 15:00Speaker 00

  The cockerel of cornflakes fame.

• 15:02Speaker 01

  We'll do more cornflake sounds for the audio only people.

• 15:05Speaker 00

  There you go. We're not skimping here. By the mid 1880s, this place is amazing. It's got electric lights, it's got light baths, whatever they are. I suppose you sit there and you get bathed in electric light, which, you know, might make you feel good, I suppose. A new six-story swanky patient wing. Then he brought in a nursery so that patients could bring their kids if they needed to. And all of this is about health. But because it wasn't cheap, it became about serving wealthy people who wanted to look, feel and sort of be better and live longer. Which, I mean, there's still plenty of places around that do exactly that. I mean, this is just one of the kind of early examples.

• 15:46Speaker 00

  They built massive laboratories so that they could analyse the bodily fluids of the patients, which is kind of gross, but people were really into this. And by the 1920s, everything had pretty much changed from those early initial days, including the name. It's now called the Battle Creek Sanitarium, known to everyone simply as The San. Celebrities and wealthy people are now starting to come in pretty big numbers. The San had more than a thousand patients at any given time, hundreds of staff. It hosted some of the most prominent names in American life. They're all coming to Battle Creek now. Industrialists, politicians, generals, celebrities.

• 16:27Speaker 00

  Henry Ford went there, John D Rockefeller, President William Howard Taft, Amelia Earhart. They're all going to this place. As for what a day at The San actually looked like? Well, early wake up, exercise sessions. This is the type of thing where people are wearing their normal clothes and doing, you know, the movements. Rob, do you remember, this is a specific reference, but do you remember in The Simpsons when Mr Burns leads that calisthenics routine?

• 16:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:57Speaker 00

  Like one.

• 16:57Speaker 01

  One high.

• 16:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Exactly.

• 16:59Speaker 01

  That's it.

• 17:00Speaker 00

  That's the thing to think about if people, if someone listening to this has that in their mind, then they're bang on the money.

• 17:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:07Speaker 00

  Then you move on, you do your medical checkups, lectures on moral living, strict vegetarian meals, obviously no alcohol, smoking or meat, no stimulating foods. We'll get to that one in a moment. Maybe some yogurt up the arse early to bed.

• 17:23Speaker 01

  This is the second time you've spoken about yogurt up the arse. What's going on here? What's going on?

• 17:30Speaker 00

  I am going to have to explain that eventually, aren't I?

• 17:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, so this is weirdly a thing.

• 17:35Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 17:35Speaker 00

  And yeah, I should back up. Yogurt up the arse. Um, I mean that in the very literal sense.

• 17:43Speaker 00

  One of Kellogg's core theories was that gut health was central to overall wellbeing. Now, this is worth saying, modern medicine does actually take gut health pretty seriously. People know that. I mean, Kellogg, he's just really early and really enthusiastic about this. I want to read, I want to read from page 180 of the book, The Kellogg's, colon, The Battling Brothers from Battle Creek for a second. Just, just bear with me.

• 18:14Speaker 00

  Down the hall from the bathrooms was the sand's Sanctum Sanctorium, the enema room, stuffed with gleaming, stuffed with gleaming enema machines that could pointedly deliver 15 quarts of water per minute into a human colon. Uh, Dr Kellogg advised his patients to produce four or more bowel movements a day, just like the healthy apes he observed while visiting the zoos in Chicago, Detroit and New York. It's getting weirder by the second. If the water enemas were not enough, brackets, a ritual he was said to engage in every morning,

• 18:57Speaker 00

  John ordered his patients to consume a pint of yogurt each day, followed by a yogurt enema, also a pint.

• 19:05Speaker 01

  Also a pint. So if 15 liters a minute of water up the arse isn't enough, then we'll get the yogurt out and see how we, see how we go.

• 19:15Speaker 00

  Well, that's, you hit the nail on the head because I Googled this. That was the first thing I did is how much is 15 quarts? Just quietly and 15 quarts is a lot. I looked it up and 15 quarts a minute is effectively like a garden hose, switched to the nozzle of jet, jet mode.

• 19:34Speaker 01

  Oh my God.

• 19:35Speaker 00

  Um, huge because I checked and modern enemas, they're like one to two quarts of warm water gently massaged through the colon. I mean, you're getting absolutely blasted if you're in the sand.

• 19:49Speaker 01

  Don't try, yeah, don't try this at home.

• 19:52Speaker 00

  Absolutely not. I mean, he's doing it every morning and he's prescribing it like it's, like it's normal. And then the second thing, the yogurt.

• 20:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:01Speaker 00

  You know what I mean? I, you've been smashed by water, smashed.

• 20:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:08Speaker 00

  And then they go, right, here we go. Um, it's not working. Uh, we just got this bag of a pint of yogurt and just hold still.

• 20:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:14Speaker 00

  Squelch.

• 20:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. Greek yogurt or?

• 20:17Speaker 00

  Probiotic.

• 20:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:18Speaker 00

  I mean, I'm trying to think, you, you're walking down the corridors of the sand and you walk past the, the sanctorum, or whatever it's called, and somebody squelches and, and squiggles their way out of that room.

• 20:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. I'm also imagining everyone walking around, like it looks like they've sat in something. They've all just got wet butts. Cause I'm assuming that like this water doesn't come out very quickly. Like I see it might drip, drip out throughout the day.

• 20:39Speaker 00

  Just a wild thing. Like, I think the thing for me is that a lot of people know about the masturbation element of the Kellogg story. I would wager that no one knows how much yogurt was going up people's asses.

• 20:51Speaker 01

  Hey, you think you know about cornflakes? Well, let me tell you something, buddy.

• 20:54Speaker 00

  Yeah. You eating your cornflakes with yogurt? Well, hey.

• 20:58Speaker 01

  It's, yeah, God, I'm, I'm just having visions of people I know doing that. Um, it's funny how close he is to being like really bang on with some of this stuff though. Because like you said, gut health is important. He understood that gut health was important and he'd picked a few things that actually aren't good for you. But then he's tied it in with, hey, do you want to put this up your ass? And that should make you feel better.

• 21:18Speaker 00

  Maybe I'm being too judgmental here. Maybe it's time to try a yogurt enema.

• 21:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:24Speaker 00

  And see if it works.

• 21:25Speaker 01

  He's, he's really the, the Pete Evans of this story, which our international viewers and listeners won't understand, but.

• 21:31Speaker 00

  Yeah. That's the sort of thing you could see coming from, from Pete.

• 21:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:35Speaker 00

  No shade to Pete, but uh, uh, yeah, that's wild. Now, is this unusual?

• 21:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:42Speaker 00

  Is it influential? Also, yes. I mean, maybe this is what you need to get people talking. Imagine hearing from a fan who's just been there, walking really funny. You okay? Yeah, I just got the equivalent of a fire hose up the clack. Now I feel great though.

• 21:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:58Speaker 00

  You know.

• 21:58Speaker 01

  Ready to start my day.

• 21:59Speaker 00

  Ready to start my day. I mean, you might want to check it out. It had cut through because what Kellogg was really doing was not just treating patients. He was selling a whole system of health. At its core, it's still a religious thing. Kellogg has found a way to flip the script though. From sending out missionaries to convert people to a religion into setting up a system where people would come to you for help and they really listened to him. He built a 1,000 person auditorium. He gave lectures all the time. But the business starts becoming bigger. For a lot of customers, it starts becoming more about selling a healthy lifestyle than about God.

• 22:44Speaker 00

  That's the turning point, the food. Food that's cheap and easy to manufacture, sold with a health message and it's easy to prepare. That's cornflakes. And that, of course, is where this story is heading. But stick with us because we're going to hear from our sponsors. The businesses built to last are usually the ones that work for the people using them, not just the people running them. Investing hasn't always been that. Brokerage fees sound like nothing until you do the maths on what they're costing you over time. So IG Trading did something about that. 50 years in global financial markets. They went and did something genuinely different. $0 commission on Aussie and international shares all the time.

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• 24:32Speaker 00

  Righto, here we go. Masturbation. People always think that this part of the story is exaggerated, but it's not at all. John Harvey Kellogg was very anti-masturbation, strictly no-touchy rules. Kellogg genuinely believed that masturbation was one of the great threats to physical health, moral stability, fabric of society, the whole thing. Not only that, there are heaps of reports that he and his own wife never consummated their marriage. So there you go.

• 25:05Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 25:06Speaker 00

  Never.

• 25:07Speaker 01

  Too busy writing.

• 25:08Speaker 00

  Mary, who's very busy making sure everyone knew about the evils. I mean, he seemed to be particularly freaked out by sexually transmitted diseases and quote, "His revulsion turned into a lifetime edifice of strict sexual abstinence." Of course, you can't get an STD from masturbating, but he hates that too. In his 1888 book, Plain Facts for Old and Young, he describes it as self-pollution and talked about it like it was a full-scale national emergency, which sounds super full-on today. I mean, a lot of you have masturbated a couple of times since we started this story, but.

• 25:48Speaker 00

  I know Adrian has. Sorry, I had to.

• 25:53Speaker 00

  But, but in the 1880s, there was a real tradition connecting sexual activity and specifically what they called the loss of vital energy to physical depletion. Kellogg sat inside that tradition. He was just particularly committed to it and full on about it. All this does come straight from the church. Ellen White, the founder, warned against the following. Tobacco, coffee, tea, tea, tea, alcohol, drugs and meat. We've talked about those ones, most of them. She also warned against tight dresses, corsets and wigs. And then, this is quite important, greasy or fried foods, spicy condiments and pickled foods.

• 26:35Speaker 00

  Quote from the book, "Such evils she taught led to the morally and physically destructive self vice of masturbation." They led to it. So to recap, spicy, greasy and pickled foods all get you excited and then you masturbate, which is bad. Do you know what I mean? Like that is, so there's a direct line of sight from one end to the other on that.

• 26:56Speaker 01

  Is this why the bathrooms at KFC are always locked?

• 27:00Speaker 00

  Maybe.

• 27:01Speaker 01

  Finger looking good.

• 27:01Speaker 00

  People getting excited, fuck.

• 27:12Speaker 00

  Swish.

• 27:16Speaker 00

  I mean, we've all been there.

• 27:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:18Speaker 00

  You eat too many pickles and you know what's coming.

• 27:21Speaker 01

  That's it, straight to the bathroom.

• 27:22Speaker 00

  Jeez, it's so weird. But fast forward, John Harvey Kellogg is now sermonizing on the evils of masturbation and he's prescribing as a doctor, the blandest vegetarian meals that he could find at the San. And you may have already figured out where this is going because he decided he needed an even more bland food. Something that wouldn't get people excited and would also help their stomach aches and help keep their bowel movements extremely regular. That bland food is cornflakes.

• 27:53Speaker 00

  That's why this story is so good. The origin of the world's most popular breakfast cereal is something designed for people who masturbate too much and poo too little. It's just sensational.

• 28:05Speaker 01

  It's incredible.

• 28:06Speaker 00

  I just didn't know it and, and I couldn't stop reading about it. Once I found that out, like, how did people not know? Like, how are these businesses so able to divert the attention away from such a wild origin story?

• 28:17Speaker 01

  It'd be great if they celebrated it.

• 28:20Speaker 00

  It would be.

• 28:20Speaker 01

  The marketing would be incredible.

• 28:22Speaker 00

  I mean, I see why they don't.

• 28:23Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 28:24Speaker 00

  I mean, just once, just be like, hey, guess what?

• 28:26Speaker 01

  Guess what?

• 28:27Speaker 00

  Really weird backstory here.

• 28:28Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 28:28Speaker 00

  And there are people who are going to nitpick this point. They'll say that cornflakes were never technically created and marketed to be a cure for masturbation. And you can argue that point, but one of the main and enduring teachings of John Harvey Kellogg was that masturbation should be avoided at all costs. And what he taught was, quote, "To a person struggling to repress evil desires, simplicity in diet and avoidance of exciting and stimulating foods is of the greatest consequence." He and his brother created a bland food and sold it alongside those teachings. The facts are enough. Everything else is semantics. Cornflakes are forever and intrinsically linked to wanking. Such a fun fact.

• 29:14Speaker 00

  I mean, bring it up to someone next time you're eating a bowl of cornflakes, surely.

• 29:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. Might not be appropriate depending on the location.

• 29:21Speaker 00

  Probably not, but you know, that's what it is.

• 29:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:24Speaker 00

  Incredible.

• 29:24Speaker 01

  I'm, I'm always thinking about the, like, the hotels where they always have, like, the big thing of cornflakes there next to the wheat bix you can go in. If you just see some stranger eating cornflakes and be like, good on you, mate. Good on you.

• 29:36Speaker 00

  Hands where I can see them.

• 29:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. What are you doing?

• 29:39Speaker 00

  But cornflakes don't appear out of thin air. They've got to figure out the formula. So in the early 1880s, into the kitchen they go. John Harvey and his brother, Will Keith Kellogg. The brief they gave themselves was simple. We want to make a food that is easy to digest, vegetarian, cheap to make, quick to prepare, and crucially, very bland. Breakfast becomes the focus and this is a really important decision. Why breakfast? Because breakfast is daily, it's repeatable and it's a pain in the ass for people. There is no quick and easy breakfast at this point, other than maybe a piece of fruit or something, if you can get it. For a lot of American and English households, it was a hot meal that took, you know, up to an hour to prepare.

• 30:22Speaker 00

  So the Kellogg's had a feeling this would be a welcome alternative and they were absolutely right. But early experiments didn't really go that well. They made a double baked bread that was so dense that it reportedly broke a patient's false teeth, which is not ideal. Then came something called granula, which is baked grain products that a patient can take home with them in a bag. And I suspect modern granola is similar and comes from that word. We'll even set up a small stall beside the sanitarium dining room to sell these boxes. And by 1889, they were shifting several tonnes of it a week. So granula was good stuff. And finally, comes the famous accident. A batch of cooked grain was left

• 31:04Speaker 00

  sitting out overnight. When they came to roll it the next morning, it didn't form into sheets. Instead, it crumbled into flakes. They toasted the flakes and patients liked them. Then they refined the process using corn and bang, you've got corn flakes. Patients at the sand started having them with milk, maybe a bit of fruit, and they were doing their regular poos, which the staff at the facility all approved of. They weren't masturbating, so they said. So it's all going really well. They're selling them at the stall and also via mail order. 10 ounce bags for 15 cents. Word spreads and the business really starts to kick off. But before we get into the business side of things,

• 31:46Speaker 00

  I was kind of debating whether to put this in here, but I do think it's important. I mean, we've been having some fun with masturbation stuff, but it's kind of no joke in a way. The book talks specifically about an escalating set of treatments for people who had trouble stopping. Level one was bandaging the hands. Level two was circumcision. It says the doctor performed this without anaesthetic because, quote, "the resultant pain had a salutary effect upon the mind." So all of a sudden, we're talking about circumcision without anesthetic, Rob.

• 32:25Speaker 01

  I feel very uncomfortable right now.

• 32:27Speaker 00

  I feel, I feel weird for having made jokes now. It's all pretty dark and it gets worse, if you can believe it. If they still did the act and the next level above that was silver sutures or wires passed through the foreskin to prevent erections.

• 32:44Speaker 01

  Oh my God.

• 32:45Speaker 00

  You know what I mean?

• 32:45Speaker 01

  Oh my God.

• 32:47Speaker 00

  You're just starting to shift uncomfortably all of a sudden. And of course, this isn't just for boys, for girls, it's also a staged system of prevention and intervention. The doctor recommends cool baths, cool enemas, more enemas. Application of, and then the level above that is application of irritants, including carbolic acid to the sexual organs.

• 33:10Speaker 01

  Oh my God, to say the cornflakes.

• 33:12Speaker 00

  That's right. I'll just stop, I, I think we have to just stop there. I mean, all of a sudden, we're talking about, like, I mean, it's, it's torture.

• 33:20Speaker 01

  It is.

• 33:20Speaker 00

  That's what it is.

• 33:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:21Speaker 00

  That's the dark, dark part of the story. But you're right, the surface level is the breakfast cereal. And that's the thing that became internationally famous quite quickly. And now, again, you can understand perhaps why the Kellogg's company today isn't that keen to throw a spotlight back on what was going on in those days at the sand, where, you know, at the same time as they were creating this great cereal, they were also doing some extremely unnecessary surgeries without anesthetic.

• 33:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, again, this is the dark part of science and that, that era.

• 33:52Speaker 00

  Extremely dark. But of course, the cereal became famous. In fact, you might successfully argue that it is the most successful intentionally bland food ever made. A hundred and twenty eight billion bowls of cornflakes are now eaten every year. And the three main reasons for its popularity are quite similar to what they were then. It was cheap, it took no time or energy to prepare at home, and it was health, and it was marketed as healthy. That's the one that later changed. But because it caught on so well, there were lots of competitors popping up too.

• 34:34Speaker 00

  Between 1888 and 1905, a hundred and one cereal companies were started in Battle Creek, Michigan alone.

• 34:45Speaker 01

  Would you say at this time that Battle Creek was called Cereal Valley?

• 34:51Speaker 00

  I reckon you would.

• 34:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:52Speaker 00

  I like it.

• 34:53Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 34:53Speaker 00

  The cereal capital of the world, perhaps.

• 34:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's it.

• 34:57Speaker 00

  I mean, and obviously Kellogg's had to become the cereal killers.

• 35:00Speaker 01

  That's it.

• 35:02Speaker 00

  So it's, it's rough. That's a rough one.

• 35:03Speaker 01

  Let's stop.

• 35:04Speaker 00

  That's bad.

• 35:05Speaker 01

  Let's leave. I'm going.

• 35:06Speaker 00

  Time to, time to rap.

• 35:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:09Speaker 00

  Now, there's one more main character that you do need to know about. It's a guy named C W Post, who arrived in, in Battle Creek at the sanitarium in 1891 as a patient. He stayed there for nine months and he left completely unimpressed with some of Kellogg's methods, but he saw the commercial potential for the food. So Charles Post went off and founded his own cereal company. He was one of the 101. Post Grape Nuts, Post Raisin Bran, Post Toasties. They were all his. He also made wild health claims about his food. At one point, he suggested that Grape Nuts could cure appendicitis and malaria, which for the record, it cannot.

• 35:53Speaker 01

  No, as much as you try.

• 35:56Speaker 00

  You can't pour a bowl of cure for that. So Kellogg's own patient became his biggest rival. And Will, Will Keith, was fuming about this. John didn't really seem to care about it as much though. He didn't like the copying, but his view was that even though the food was being sold, the main business was the sand. And Will didn't see it that way. He just saw someone stealing their main business, which is exactly what started happening. Because in 1906, C W Post directly copied the Kellogg's recipe and started selling it as Post Toasties and he made millions. Now that rivalry. Didn't really last all that long because remember that Charlie Post was a patient at

• 36:40Speaker 00

  the San, he was there because he had chronic stomach pain and he never managed to make it go away. And in 1914, he took his own life, which is really sad. But the Kellogg's continued talking shit about him for years. Like they were very unsentimental about the whole thing.

• 36:55Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 36:56Speaker 00

  And without a common enemy, Will and John turn on each other, Rob.

• 37:01Speaker 01

  Seems to be a bit of a theme of brothers in business not getting along on this show.

• 37:05Speaker 00

  It is a bit. Maybe there's a whole kind of, there's an whole avenue of that, of the biggest brotherly fallouts in business history. This would be up there.

• 37:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 37:14Speaker 00

  But the main split between them came because Will decided that the cereal had to taste good.

• 37:20Speaker 01

  Fair.

• 37:21Speaker 00

  That's where they broke off.

• 37:22Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 37:23Speaker 00

  Now, this is where the whole story turns into just pure drama because John was still giving lectures and harping on about the health evils and the white supremacy of it all, which we haven't talked about, we'll get to that in a minute. Will, his brother, he was thinking about money. He wanted to scale the breakfast cereal business well beyond the San. And in 1901, Will quit the San to focus on the food business, of which he was a 25% owner. And he made some key changes. First, he added sugar and salt. John was completely furious about that. In fact, Will's son later recalled that John had, quote, "a fit" and, quote, "got after my father," which I imagine to mean he chased him around the room, which is kind of funny.

• 38:07Speaker 01

  But yeah.

• 38:09Speaker 00

  Exactly. Like in the way that brothers do, perhaps when they're five or six, but they're doing it, you know.

• 38:14Speaker 01

  In their 50s.

• 38:15Speaker 00

  As titans of industry now.

• 38:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:17Speaker 00

  Will also improved the packaging. He invested heavily in advertising and he aimed the product squarely at everyday households, not just patients in a health retreat or people who wanted to improve their health. John became even more furious because John thought that all of this, particularly the sugar, betrayed the entire mission. I mean, he saw cornflakes as a medical tool, but the horse was already bolting. Will built a huge factory in Battle Creek and in 1908, he and his son, John Leonard, another John.

• 38:50Speaker 01

  Not John Lennon.

• 38:50Speaker 00

  No, John Leonard.

• 38:51Speaker 01

  Oh, John Leonard. Okay.

• 38:52Speaker 00

  Not John, I imagine.

• 38:53Speaker 01

  And then he started the Beatles.

• 38:54Speaker 00

  And then John Lennon was in there. Yeah, John Lennon was having a real crack at cornflakes back in the day.

• 39:02Speaker 00

  No, I imagine John Lennon quite liked jorking it.

• 39:07Speaker 00

  Is that a weird thing to say?

• 39:08Speaker 01

  No. Him and Yoko Wado probably got up some interesting stuff.

• 39:11Speaker 00

  I mean, you know, he was part of the sexual revolution. He's not going to be like, nah, don't touch it.

• 39:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's pro sugar in his cereal, I reckon, John Lennon.

• 39:17Speaker 00

  There's a spectrum of Johns in the world.

• 39:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:19Speaker 00

  From very anti to very pro.

• 39:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:22Speaker 00

  And we're finding them both here. So, but, so Will apparently told his son, John Leonard, quote, "We can now turn out 4,200 cases a day and that is all the business I ever want." One year later, he was shipping 120,000 cases of cornflakes a day. So it turns out he wanted and achieved more. And the growth did not stop for many, many years, particularly because Will understood the importance of advertising. Fast forward to the 1950s, not long after Will stepped down as boss and Kellogg's was making food in the US, Canada, Australia, South Africa, England, Mexico, Ireland, Sweden and Holland.

• 40:03Speaker 00

  They had a constant reserve of one and a half million bushels of grain. And the daily output at the Battle Creek factory alone was up to six million boxes of cereal a day. An absolutely incredible growth story. But when Will broke away, all that was in the distance. First, he had to wrestle his own surname off John Harvey. So they went to war. The court action started in 1910 with Will seeking an injunction against John from using the Kellogg name when selling food. And specifically that, he could still use it at the San as a doctor and when selling medical products.

• 40:48Speaker 00

  And the reason was simple. Will had the Kellogg's toasted cornflake company and John had the Kellogg's food company of Battle Creek. It's just confusing. I mean, shops had the food next to each other and nobody knew which version they were buying, the one that tasted good or the one that stopped you from wanking.

• 41:05Speaker 01

  I keep buying the wrong one.

• 41:06Speaker 00

  I know, I know. I'm not healthy and I'm going to town on myself.

• 41:10Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 41:11Speaker 00

  Or this one doesn't taste good, but I have no sexual appetite.

• 41:14Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 41:14Speaker 00

  Know what I mean?

• 41:17Speaker 00

  So the case came down to who was the kind of the real Kellogg? And it took more than 10 years to figure that out. But in 1921, Will was successful. The Supreme Court held that Will owned the exclusive rights to trade under the name Kellogg when it comes to food. And from that point on, they were fully split and they both head in truly separate directions. As mentioned, Will was an amazing businessman. I mean, even through the Great Depression, he managed profits of $6 million a year. Again, I mean, he was selling something cheap and easy, which is helpful in that kind of economy. But by the time Will retired in 1939 at the age of 79, his business controlled more than 40%

• 42:00Speaker 00

  of the ready to eat cereal market in the US and 50% overseas, which kind of goes to show how much of an American story this really is. Nobody else seemed to really be doing cereal to this sort of scale at the time.

• 42:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's interesting.

• 42:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was definitely an American thing and specifically it was really a Michigan thing. Often gets overlooked.

• 42:20Speaker 01

  Cereal Valley.

• 42:21Speaker 00

  Cereal Valley. He handed the company over to a series of former bankers and marketing people when he did step down, who grew the business, obviously. Brought in great advertising plans, including Cornelius, the cockerel. Can we get a shake? Yes.

• 42:39Speaker 00

  And of course, the signature WK Kellogg, which appeared on all the boxes. After all, he spent 10 years making sure that he could have that name. The company ended up with 25 distinct breakfast cereals. Almost all of them are sugary and the destination, I mean, it would make John Rollin his grave because get this, in 2023, Kellogg's was split into Kellinova and WK Kellogg Co. Kellinova was bought by Mars for $36 billion and WK Kellogg was bought by Ferrero for 3.1 billion. So in the end, this beacon of health food ended up in the hands of two international chocolate companies.

• 43:19Speaker 01

  Ironic.

• 43:20Speaker 00

  It is. And jeez, if you were John Harvey, you'd be fuming.

• 43:23Speaker 01

  Hey, we'd be very upset.

• 43:24Speaker 00

  It only took 100 years to get there, but it's a funny destination. As for John, he stayed at the san. He performed surgeries until he was 84. By all accounts, he was actually quite good. The book goes into specifics, saying that he, he actually didn't lose a lot of patients. Despite the fact that, you know, antiseptics were pretty early on. They weren't wearing face masks, all this sort of stuff. He was apparently quite a good surgeon. But there is something else worth flagging before we kind of land the plane on this. John got really into eugenics and white supremacy. In fact, right up until he died during World War Two, he was one of America's most vocal supporters of eugenics.

• 44:05Speaker 00

  And what that was, was basically a system of thinking, which is presented as medical or scientific, where most, if not all of a society's problems are laid at the feet of anyone other than God-abiding, white Anglo-Saxon people. You know, that's the whole, that's basically the whole thing. Anything you can find that's wrong with the society is, is the fault of them, not us.

• 44:28Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 44:30Speaker 00

  It's kind of not really a tangent. I mean, it's all sort of boiled in the same pot as that virtue stuff that we were talking about before. But it is part of the reason that John Kellogg is not really talked about much in medical America these days as a trailblazer. I mean, he was right about some stuff like gut health and the issues with smoking and drinking. He was early on that. He was wrong about some of the weird stuff like yoghurt enemas and masturbation. And he was dangerously wrong about stuff like race controls and breeding and unnecessary genital surgeries, Rob. So there's a spectrum of stuff going on with that guy.

• 45:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, again, this is just science of the era.

• 45:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:13Speaker 01

  They're kind of throwing a lot at the board and seeing what sticks.

• 45:15Speaker 00

  I suppose you can just cast a net over this whole era and say, there was some pretty weird ideas coming out. And you have to be quite selective in a way about, about sort of, I don't know.

• 45:26Speaker 01

  Cause this is like the era of like phrenology, where they thought that the size of your head determined all these things about you, which just couldn't be more wrong.

• 45:32Speaker 00

  Totally. I mean, it's, a lot of it is absolute quackery, but you know, he was one of the first people who said, don't smoke. Bad for you.

• 45:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:39Speaker 00

  That's not a bad call.

• 45:40Speaker 01

  And up until what, like the sixties, like doctors were advertising that it was good for you.

• 45:44Speaker 00

  Totally. He was very early on that. And he was a medical doctor by the standards of the day. As usual, I mean, this kind of stuff couldn't be further from the identity of the brands we associate with Kellogg's these days. I'm finding out that a lot of these companies have very strange and dark backstories, but they just get buried, of course.

• 46:05Speaker 00

  Okay, let's pull all this together. Cornflakes came from a doctor in Michigan who wanted people to stop masturbating. And that's the funny part of the story, also the yogurt enemas. But the reason it matters and the reason that it's more and bigger than a weird historical footnote is what it actually created. Cause the Kellogg's story tells us two really interesting chapters of mass food marketing. The first chapter is health. The brothers turned health into a commercial product. Before the San, health was mostly a private matter. I mean, it's something you either had or you didn't have.

• 46:46Speaker 00

  Together, they built a business, a serious, growing, profitable business around the idea that mass-produced food could improve your health if you bought it and ate it. And that seed, I mean, that grew into a truly massive part of the economy that we still live in. Think of all the food marketing that is now built around health. I'd argue heaps of it, maybe even most of it. Detox tea, protein powder, vitamins, clean eating programs, probiotic yogurts that you eat, to be clear. So many of them can draw their ancestry back to John Kellogg in one way or another. I mean, nobody seems to put it up.

• 47:28Speaker 00

  Nobody seems to put the yogurt up their ass anymore, but that's neither here nor there. And the second chapter is sugar. By betraying the healthy starting point, the real growth was available to Will Kellogg, not John. Will industrialized it. He added the sugar, flavor and advertising. He put it in boxes and he sold it around the entire world. It's kind of a bait and switch. The idea of breakfast cereals was originally that they were healthy and easy and they were a great way to start the day. And over time, that company made them an unhealthy, easy way to start the day.

• 48:08Speaker 00

  Now is that bad? It's not great, but that's business. People can choose to buy whatever they want and the change happens slowly enough. But it's worth understanding how old that pitch is and how much it's changed. We're still eating their business model every single morning. 350 million bowls of it.

• 48:32Speaker 00

  But now it's about selling the cereal rather than selling any kind of religious health message. That can happen over time. People love masturbating after all.

• 48:42Speaker 01

  They do, they do.

• 48:43Speaker 00

  Rob, what do you reckon? Final thoughts?

• 48:47Speaker 01

  I've got a lot.

• 48:48Speaker 00

  A lot.

• 48:49Speaker 01

  It would have been really funny if Will dislike, as well as leaning into sugar, also led into the masturbation on the other side. Being like, hey, have this sugary cereal, it'll make it better for you. That would have been pretty funny.

• 49:01Speaker 01

  A quick shout out to everyone who's now going to have really awkward moments at the family breakfast table, having post-listened to this.

• 49:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, true. Yeah.

• 49:08Speaker 01

  It's gonna make for an interesting conversation.

• 49:10Speaker 00

  I mean, that's the thing. It's, it's, it's form part of the daily routine of so many people and not knowing the origin, I think, makes it weird.

• 49:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, and for other people whose daily routine involves fornication, a shout out to you as well. Maybe have more cornflakes.

• 49:22Speaker 00

  I was talking to, yeah, I was talking to someone about this the other day who said, um, it's ironic because breakfast cereal is now synonymous with being like a layabout, like a stoner who doesn't really have much motivation to do anything. And he's probably sitting around doing a bit of that.

• 49:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:35Speaker 00

  So, you know, cause it's so easy.

• 49:37Speaker 01

  It is easy. It's quick. You get it done. Fast paced society, quick bowl of cereal out the door.

• 49:42Speaker 00

  But I do think it's interesting, like, where, like, how far these businesses and business models go over the course of 170, 200 years. I mean, you start in one place and one foot in front of the other, you end up in a completely different place where they're owned by, you know, chocolate companies and they are not about health at all. But it's just about, you know, the maneuverability of that kind of first message, the people who drop off and the people who succeed with it.

• 50:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. It's that sort of turning point of mass industrialization where we go from, hey, come to us, enjoy this thing. It's really good to let's get this thing everywhere.

• 50:17Speaker 00

  That's it. I think that's a really important point is that it was kind of this era and it started of. The industrialist in food, the people who wanted one of their products in every single pantry in the country, you know, Heinz ketchup is another great example. The idea that this is going to be appropriate for every single person. And Kellogg's was right smack bang in the middle of that.

• 50:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 50:41Speaker 00

  Fascinating story, but we do have to talk about the two truths and a lie, the reveal. Where do we go? Where do we land? Fact or lie, number one, John Harvey Kellogg reportedly spent his wedding night writing a book about the dangers of sex. True, Rob.

• 50:57Speaker 01

  Ah, John.

• 50:58Speaker 00

  True.

• 50:59Speaker 01

  You loser.

• 50:59Speaker 00

  His marriage to Ella Eaton was, by most accounts, lifelong and celibate. They did foster 42 children. Hats off to that.

• 51:09Speaker 01

  That's nice of them. Well done.

• 51:10Speaker 00

  Zero biological children, of course.

• 51:12Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 51:12Speaker 00

  But he did reportedly spend his honeymoon and wedding night writing this health text. I mean, you could argue it was an essay rather than a book, but.

• 51:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:20Speaker 00

  It's there. That's true.

• 51:21Speaker 01

  Poor Ella.

• 51:22Speaker 00

  I, yeah, maybe she wasn't into it either.

• 51:24Speaker 01

  That's fair enough. Each to their own.

• 51:27Speaker 00

  Number two, John Harvey Kellogg believed a healthy human should produce four to five odorless bowel movements per day. Also true. Pretty keen on the regularity and consistency and the smell of the poo. He was very interested in that. Fair enough. I mean, I guess he was a medical doctor after all, but he based a lot of this on the gorilla, the gorillas that he saw at the zoo, which feels less scientific.

• 51:49Speaker 01

  Does this mean he was going around smelling gorilla shit?

• 51:51Speaker 00

  Well, eh, maybe. Remember that the San had this big laboratory where they were, you know, identifying and getting a really good look at all the bodily fluids and poos.

• 52:01Speaker 01

  And he's just gone, nah.

• 52:04Speaker 00

  It's too smelly. I mean, I didn't technically in that story, I didn't actually say that he wanted them to be odorless, but there are multiple points in the book where that is made clear. He wanted them not to be too smelly. And so, you know, eat lots of, you know, vegetarian and bland foods and you'll be right.

• 52:18Speaker 01

  I mean, look, it's.

• 52:19Speaker 00

  That one's true.

• 52:19Speaker 01

  I mean, it's a, it's a fair thing. If you've ever visited a public toilet, you probably wish that, you know, John Harvey Kellogg was right.

• 52:25Speaker 00

  Where's John Harvey Kellogg when you need him?

• 52:27Speaker 01

  Where is he when I need him? I'm at Flinster Street Station.

• 52:29Speaker 00

  Plus, he's having 15 quarts of water powdered into him every morning.

• 52:34Speaker 00

  It's gonna be hard to have any kind of normal poo after that.

• 52:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:38Speaker 00

  It's gross. Move on. Number three, John Harvey Kellogg died in poverty, having lost the rights to the Kellogg name in court. That's the lie. He did lose the commercial war. He lost the court case and Will got to keep the surname printed on food. But John Harvey Kellogg kept on working until he was basically at the end of his life. He died in 1943, the age of 91. But he wasn't poor. He wasn't destitute in any way. Still no sugar, still no meat, entirely convinced about everything he believed. But the only thing he was, was he was not the more famous Kellogg at the end of his life.

• 53:13Speaker 01

  He lived to 91. That's a pretty good knock.

• 53:17Speaker 00

  You can't argue with that. Well done. Yeah, well, he was a very healthy man.

• 53:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:20Speaker 00

  And he didn't do anything silly ever.

• 53:23Speaker 01

  No.

• 53:24Speaker 00

  It was kind of his thing. Kellogg's, probably the strangest origin story I can think of for a company everyone in the world is familiar with. Next episode, we're going to talk about one of the biggest and most influential inventions of the 20th century. Why it was deliberately ignored and what the consequences of that were for all of us. Thanks for listening. Rob, thanks, mate.

• 53:48Speaker 01

  Enjoy your cereal, everyone.

• 53:52Speaker 00

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• 54:38Speaker 00

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