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On March 7, new boxes of cereals will be opened nationwide in honor of National Cereal Day. With more than 2.7 billion boxes of cereal being sold every year and 49 percent of the 314 million people in the U.S. who start their day with a bowl of cereal, it’s pretty easy to see why cereal is so damn good. The proof is pretty much in the bowl.
These days when most people hear cereal, they automatically think of it as a just a bowl sugar saturated with milk, but it’s actually so much more than that. In fact, breakfast cereal was initially created in the mid-1800s to remedy Americans’ diets which at the time was filled with protein from meats, alcohol and tons of caffeine. To help fix some of the health issues Americans were facing due to their poor diets, cereal was presented as a potential solution to help balance out the poor diets and health issues accumulated by the masses.
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And while eating a bowl of cereal is pretty much considered a treat today, back then, cereal was literally too hard to swallow at times. Cereals back then were made of dense (and bland) bran nuggets and were so hard that they had to be soaked overnight just to make it not so taxing to digest.
The sugar, artificial flavors and some of our favorite cereal brands came much, much later.
The brand responsible for cereal classics like Corn Flakes and Frosted Flakes was founded by the Kellog Brothers. John Kellog was a surgeon who devoted his time to making healthy food like granola for his patients while William Kellog unknowingly concocted a process that allowed wheat to flake. Two years later corn flakes were created, and the rest is history.
Charles William Post got into the cereal business while he was recuperating from his second nervous breakdown in 1893. He just so happened to be at the same sanitarium that the Kellogg brothers attended and was inspired to open his own spa and to further his interest in coffee products and breakfast foods. By 1897, he was selling what is now known as Grape-nuts and his own brand of corn flakes, Post Toasties.
As for sweetened cereal, in 1939 cereal was no longer considered to be healthy food. The first sweetened cereal, Ranger Joe Popped Wheat Honnie started to appear in grocery stores thus igniting cereal’s appeal to children. More radio and television ads and cereals marketed towards children started to use cartoon characters to appeal more to children as well.
While you pour yourself a bowl of cereal, take a look at these funny memes and let us know what cereal you will be celebrating with on National Cereal Day?
