Cereality
Dr John Harvey Kellogg looked up from his petri-dish of bran.
‘This bowl is far too small!’ he muttered. ‘Look – my spoon can't even fit in there. See?’
Curtis, his assistant, scurried from the laboratory with as much speed as his twisted spine would allow, so as to fetch his master either a much larger bowl or a far smaller spoon.
Kellogg, meanwhile, rubbed his eyes. Perhaps he should have taken his mother's advice and confined his research to that which had made Battle Creek Sanitarium the most lucrative sex clinic in Michigan. Filth.
But, no – he couldn't face even the thought of another naked woman. He had studied every aspect of them and from so many different angles that the very idea filled him with an inertia so immovable that even Sir Isaac Newton would have been confounded. That's why he'd given it all up to invent a new breakfast cereal. The world was crying out for one, after all.
But that was when the problems started.
In a fit of sibling rivalry, his brother, William Keith Kellogg III, had rushed his own cereal off the assembly line and into the shops before his older sibling had even ordered his first husk of wheat. But William's hastily concocted package-breakfast did not sell well, made as it was from bamboo and aphids. Even a last-minute 'New-and-Improved' sticker and the promise of 'a sprinkling of graphite' was not enough to turn things around. By the time the younger Kellogg had settled the lawsuits, the older one had an experimental working model of a granola-based porridge ready for testing on hamsters.
They loved it.
Human experiments were a more dangerous area, though, and a serious moral question hung over them. The Hague had banned them after the infamous Marmite Tests had caused several Alcatraz inmates to explode back in 1923. Kellogg the Elder had to illegally traffic his volunteers in from South America.
Manacled to each other in rows of twenty they'd sit at a long table for twenty-four hours a day tasting spoons-full of various blends of oats, rice and bran. Every month they were allowed a day off to go the toilet. It was hard work but they were paid well: all the cereal they could eat plus all the cereal they couldn't eat. It very nearly came undone, though, when several of the prisoners escaped and reported their treatment to the Anti-Fibre Lobby. Fortunately, the Anti-Fibre Lobby was a non-existent organisation set up by Kellogg just in case any of his slaves got loose and tried to blab to the authorities. Within hours they were returned to the Battle Creek compound by Kellogg's goons; re-strapped onto their gurneys and being force-fed muesli through a tube.
It was 1943 before Kellogg made any real headway and in March of the following year it was a case of Eureka!
A case of Eureka had arrived mistakenly from Holland. No one could make head nor tail of it – but it tasted great! Kellogg re-branded it ‘Kellocrisps’ and supermarkets couldn't get enough of it. This was primarily because of Kellogg's foolish one-sixteenth ounce packets. But once the scale problem was sorted out, Kellogg made millions. There were side effects, though – hair loss, blindness, tooth blistering and spontaneous combustion.
There was an FDA investigation into the ingredients of Kellocrisps and Kellogg was forced by subpoena to take the stand and defend his product under oath. He said, truthfully, that his cereal was made of 100% Eureka but that he wasn't exactly sure what Eureka was, given that the bio-medical labels on the plastic bags it came in were filled out entirely in Dutch, a language Dr Kellogg claimed, in an overabundance of caution, never to have heard of.
It turned out that Eureka was more properly known as Eu.R EKA, an acronym for European Union Regulation Extraneous Krill Association, a syndicate of North Sea countries led by Norway, who were committed to reducing the food supply of whales. It was their way of getting around the ban on whaling; if they couldn't harpoon them, then they'd starve them to death. Only the excess krill hadn't been cleaned properly and was deemed by the FDA to be unfit for human consumption.
The full weight of 1943 consumer protection law was brought to bear on Kellogg: he had his licence suspended for three weeks and was fined $2.
A few years later he invented cornflakes and made a fucking fortune.
This piece originally appeared in ‘Time Out Sydney’.
Shaun Micallef is a Melbourne-based writer, producer, actor and comedian, and the host of ‘Talkin’ ’bout Your Generation’, on Network Ten. His 2004 book, ‘Smithereens’, is well worth tracking down.
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