What's for Breakfast?

Happy Monday! What’s for breakfast?

I would love to find a “history of cereal” book, and if you know of good one, do let me know. Because I am always very curious about “how we got here” — where “here,” in this case, is a cereal aisle in the grocery store that is simply overflowing with boxes of colorful, sugary carbohydrates. As I noted in the my essay on the history of granola, breakfast cereals can be traced to the nineteenth century wellness movement — a movement that largely eschewed sugar — and early commercial products like Corn Flakes and Grape Nuts — weren’t particularly sweet. (Thanks to Wikipedia, I can tell you that the first cereal marketed to children was introduced in 1939 — sugar-coated puffed rice, sound familiar?)

I’ll have more to say about cereal in this week’s essay — how the cereal industry is coping with some of the prevailing “wellness” narratives of our day, namely “carbs are bad,” a variation of / corollary to “sugar is bad.”