I like spicy food. Mind you, I don’t want to have to be taken to the ER over the spiciness, but it’s fun (and satisfying) when it presents you with a little bit of a challenge. You know who didn’t think so? John Harvey Kellogg, brother of Will Keith (better known as “WK”) Kellogg. John was a Seventh-day Adventist, a branch of Christianity that advocates a strict vegetarian diet devoid of alcohol, caffeine, or meat, and he was a fervent believer in abstinence – to his way of thinking, sex and masturbation were unhealthy and abnormal. In 1894, John and WK were running a sanitarium and health spa in the town of Battle Creek, Michigan, a facility that counted among its more famous patrons President Warren G. Harding, Henry Ford, and Amelia Earhart. The Adventists believed in maintaining the purity of the “body’s temple.” John Kellogg, however, took the Adventist belief in maintaining the purity of the body to ridiculous extremes. He was firmly convinced that sex itself was impure and harmful – and most especially the “solitary vice,” the “self-pollution” of masturbation. Kellogg was married, but never consummated the union; he and his wife had separate bedrooms, and they adopted all their children. He became famous across the country for his books condemning sex, promoting celibacy, and luridly describing the evil health effects of “onanism.” In his book, Plain Facts for Old and Young, he described what he saw as the negative effects of masturbation, which included mood swings, bad posture, acne, baldness, stiff joints, and palpitations, as well as a taste for spicy food.
Who’s bald, had acne as a teenager, has been known to be moody, and likes spicy food?
/* raises hand */
To stave off any potential desire, Kellogg worked on ways people could curb sexual impulses, and this included creating the most bland breakfast cereal known to humanity – corn flakes – as well as a contraption that ran water through the bowel before flushing it with yogurt by way of the anus. He wrote, “Neither plague, nor war, nor small-pox have produced results so disastrous to humanity as the pernicious habit of onanism. Such a victim dies literally by his own hand.”
Doesn’t he sound fun?
Kellogg was convinced that eating meats and spicy foods increased the sex drive, and forbade any of them at his sanitarium. In their place, he prescribed a bland tasteless diet consisting mostly of whole grains and nuts – in so doing, he was following the lead of Presbyterian religious fanatic Sylvester Graham, who had invented the whole-wheat graham cracker as part of a diet that would reduce people’s sexual desire and stop them from both copulating and masturbating. No really! This guy was crackers… literally. Kellogg attempted to make his own anti-sex food by mixing corn meal and oatmeal into dough, adding nuts, and baking them into biscuits which were then crumbled into pieces; he called it “granula,” but that name was already being used by another health food fanatic with a similar product who threatened to sue him for copyright infringement, so Kellogg changed the name of his concoction to “granola.” The Kellogg brothers also experimented with whole-grain dough to make thin rolled sheets of toasted crackers. One day, after just having cooked some wheat for rolling, they were unexpectedly called away, and when they got back they ran the cooled wheat through the rollers, and each grain was flattened into an individual flake. Viola, they had their anti-sex food – in 1898 they tried the same process using corn instead of wheat, and “corn flakes” were born. The two brothers patented their flake cereals and formed the Sanitas Food Company to sell them through mail-order, mostly to former patients of the sanitarium. After a time, the wheat flakes were dropped, but corn flake sales remained low, mostly because John Kellogg refused to add sugar (on religious grounds) to the recipe to make the cereal more palatable.
Finally in 1906, out of frustration, WK Kellogg purchased the rights to make “corn flakes” from his brother, changed the recipe to include sugar, and set up the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company. After a protracted legal battle with his brother over the use of the name “Kellogg” this became the Kellogg Cereal Company we know today. By 1930, the Kellogg Cereal Company was the largest breakfast cereal maker in the world, with its primary competition, the Post Cereal Company, founded by CW Post, a former patient at the Battle Creek sanitarium.
WK Kellogg always insisted CW Post stole the recipe for corn flakes from his hospital’s safe!
I still like spicy foods.
And I have no interest in a yogurt enema!