Mike Carruthers:
There's a very good chance that for breakfast this morning
you had cereal.
David
Hoffman:
Supposedly 95% of all Americans like cereal, first of
all, and one out of two start their morning with a bowl of cereal.
David
Hoffman, author of the book, The
Breakfast Cereal Gourmet, says the idea of breakfast cereal
goes back a long way.
One way
you can look at it is, colonial housewives used to take popcorn,
douse it in cream and a little bit of sugar and serve it to
pilgrims as their morning meal. Most of us, the breakfast cereal
as we know it started first with a guy named Sylvester Graham
in the 1830s and he is the guy who gave us graham crackers.
He invented
graham crackers as a healthy more digestible alternative to
some of the heavy foods Americans were eating at the time.
And then
there were several followers of his, one of whom was John Harvey
Kellogg, who would break the crackers up and serve it in a bowl,
you know, usually with milk at the Kellogg Sanitarium in Battle
Creek.
But breakfast
cereal really didn't take off until the late '40s and early
'50s...
when
Sugar Crisp came out which was the first sweetened breakfast
cereal and when everyone started advertising on TV.
And today
cereal is a huge industry.
But I
think there's a really strong connection between cereal and
advertising. In fact, the only industry that advertises more
on TV than breakfast cereal is the car industry. If you walk
into a supermarket there are over 400 brands of cereal available.
Tomorrow,
the strange origin of Cap'n Crunch. I'm Mike Carruthers and
that's Something You Should Know.
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