Kellogg Brothers: a family feud and the creation of a cereal empire

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Hello, Greg here.

Just a reminder before we get going that episodes of Your Dead to Me are released on Fridays wherever you get your podcasts.

But if you're in the UK, you can listen to the latest episodes 28 days earlier than anywhere else.

First on BBC Sounds.

Hello, and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously.

My name is Greg Jenner, I'm a public historian, author, and broadcaster.

And today, we are grabbing our spoons and tucking into a big old bowl of cereal as we saunter back to 19th-century America to learn all about the Kellogg brothers.

And to help us, we have two very special breakfast buddies in History Corner.

She's Associate Professor in the History of Science and Medicine at the University of Birmingham's Department of Applied Health Science.

You may have read her excellent book, Higher and Colder, on the history of extreme exploration, exploration, and you'll definitely remember her from our episodes on Victorian bodybuilding and the Northwest Passage.

That's not one episode.

It'll be weird if it was.

It's Dr.

Vanessa Heggey.

Welcome back, Vanessa.

It's great to be back.

And in Comedy Corner, he's a comedian, actor, and writer.

You all know him from loads of television programmes, including Mop the Week, QI, Have I Got News for You, and Live at the Apollo.

Plus, he's a staple of BBC Radio 4 shows like The Unbelievable Truth, The News Quiz, and The Infinite Monkey Cage.

Maybe you've seen one of his amazing live tour shows, including the award-winning Tragedy Plus Time.

That's right, it's Ed Byrne.

Welcome to the show, Ed.

Thank you very much indeed.

I feel like I shouldn't even be here when I had toast for breakfast.

It feels like I really left the side down already.

Well, you said you had toast and then you added with bon mamma.

Bon moment.

Chocolate hasn't got spread on it, yeah.

Just for the really healthy kick.

There's nuts in there.

That's good, right?

Ed, your first time on the show.

We're delighted to have you in.

First question I have to ask, contractually obligated, are you a history fan, lover, admirer?

Did he like it at school?

Do you partake?

Yeah, I mean, history at school, it's interesting.

Like, as an Irish person, I have massive gaps in what I'm expected to know living in England.

Like, anything to do with the British monarchy that people here just take for granted as knowing.

I'm just absolutely out in the cold.

And I have, and I have

no notion of who came where.

I mean, having numbers in the king's names helps.

That helps, yeah.

But I would have absolutely no idea beyond that.

I know that Edward III would have come after Edward II.

And even as those words came out of my mouth, I'm not sure there were three Edwards there.

So, you know, that's how that's

absolutely no knowledge whatsoever.

From an almost political decision to not know about the British royal family.

Like, it was almost ingrained in you that it was something you weren't supposed to know about.

Okay.

That even having lived now in Britain since the age of 18, I'm determined to keep it as a black spot in my knowledge.

Always lets me down when I'm watching University Challenge or any time I had a pub quiz or anything like that.

Okay, well, today we're talking about America, so you don't have to do any royal stuff.

What do you know about, well, I mean, breakfast cereal?

Are you a.

Have you ever been a breakfast cereal guy?

Yeah, totally.

Yeah.

Oh, no, absolutely.

And it's one of those ones where if I have even an ordinary breakfast cereal like crunching on corn flakes, I pat myself on the back for not having a cinnamon swirl.

I do feel feel quite good about myself

if I haven't had a fry-up or basically cake.

So, yeah.

And even if it's the sort of sugary end of the market, I feel quite pleased with myself.

Fair enough.

So, what do you know?

This is the So what do you know?

This is where I have a go at guessing what you, our lovely listener, might know about today's subject.

And I think, like Ed, most of you are familiar with the Kellogg's brand.

If you eat cereal like Ed, you're going to recognize their various popular products, then their mascots that go with them, including Snap, Crackle, and Pop, and the iconic Tony the Tiger.

He's

fine.

He's fine.

But I'm guessing the history of the Kellogg family specifically might be less familiar, unless you are a serial serial botherer or you've seen the 1994 movie The Road to Wellville starring Anthony Hopkins, which you have, Ed.

Yeah, I have a vague connection with that film, only with Matthew Roderick, in that my second cousin, that is my mother's cousin's daughter, used to go out with Matthew Broderick.

See, basically, in the film.

That's what I'm hearing.

My other movie connection is that her brother, Sean Frye, was one of the kids on the bikes in E.T.

So, yeah, we have some Hollywood-ass connections in my family.

Family.

All right, so how did a family feud lead to the creation of such an iconic company?

What wellness fads were popular in the late 19th century?

And what has Yoggart got to do with it?

Let's find out.

What's Yoggart got to do with it?

The Tina Turner classic that never was.

Dr.

Vanessa, let's start with the basics then.

Who were the Kellogg family and we've talked about the Kellogg brothers, which brothers?

So the two brothers we're talking about are John Harvey Kellogg, who was born on the 26th of February 1852, and his younger brother, Will Keith Kellogg, born on the 7th of April 1860.

But they are part of a large family.

Their dad, John Preston Kellogg, had five children with his first wife Mary Ann and then 11 with his second wife Anne Stanley.

So John and Will are numbers 10 and 14 for John Preston out of his total of 16 kids.

This is back in the day when you used to shoot at a lot of people.

I've had a lot, yes.

Especially with two marriages.

You were going to lose a couple annually somewhere in the shopping.

Spoilers, that's coming up.

Okay, so when John was born in 1852, the family are still trying to make it as farmers in Michigan.

But shortly after his birth, they sold the farm, they bought a broom factory, and then in 1856 they moved with their new business to Battle Creek, a small town which is where Will's born.

And while John Harvey is charming and sociable, Will is not those things.

He is not as outgoing.

His family definitely thought he wasn't as smart as his older brother John.

And the brothers do not have a good relationship.

John physically and verbally bullied his younger brother and he used his storytelling ability to get Will in trouble by telling tales on him when he'd done something wrong.

I mean, I mean, I don't know what your family situation was.

How would you have coped growing up with one of 16 kids?

That's quite the dynamic, isn't it?

Yeah, I mean, I resented having to share a room with one other person.

But that is

just how they did it.

And it doesn't, I don't want to say that life was cheap or anything like that, but you did used to just fire out quite a few, and then it becomes a thing of your children are expected, the elder ones are expected to raise the younger ones.

Sure.

I think as we've gone, you know, forward through the generations, the amount of parenting one does has definitely increased.

I mean, I already resent the amount of parenting I have to do versus the amount of parenting I myself have received.

Gotcha.

I think when my kids were, say, five and four, I could have easily just left them in a field and I would already have done more parenting than my dad did his entire life, having had twice the number of children.

Okay, so 16 kids, That's extraordinary.

You know, a lot of breakfast bowls around the dinner table.

But tragedy struck, and those breakfast bowls diminished.

Yeah, and tragedy struck many times.

So, as you probably guessed by the fact that there were two wives, Mary Ann Kellogg, John Prescott's first wife, dies of tuberculosis in 1841.

And amongst the siblings, the direct siblings of John and Will, four of the 11 of them die, three of them in infancy, and one of them is sort of in their early teenage years.

And even for those that survive, this is a childhood that's marked out by sickness.

When their mum, Anne, isn't giving birth, she's usually nursing or caring for one of the kids, or even for her husband.

She's nursing them through illness and infection.

It makes her very sceptical about the skills of local doctors, and she's quite interested in developing her own medical and nursing skills, particularly when she manages to get the whole family through a bout of what could have been fatal measles in 1850.

Her interest in medicine started because of the poor standard of care from the local doctor you said, but also John Preston, the father of the family, he'd sustained an axe wound.

Do you know what the local doctor recommended to cure that?

Walk it off.

Rub dirt on it?

Not far off, actually.

It's sew it up, cover it with a piece of shoe leather and then bandages, and then maybe wash it with carbolic soap every now and again.

It takes two months for this to heal up.

And this is a big deal when you're having to care and earn money for a family of this size.

And the two brothers also had their periods of sickness as well.

What else would one have done in those days?

Like, what else could you do other than sew it up and keep it clean?

I mean, it didn't have...

It's the shoe leather that's the issue right okay that would that would exacerbate the problem it would make it all sweaty Yes, right, yes, and also shoe leather is made from tanned leather which is species and we don't yeah, we don't know how that was produced whether it was hygienic They had their own farm They may have made their own It's just it's not a great I mean this this era is sort of not quite germ theory yet We're a long way off germ theory at this point in it which is the understanding that diseases particularly infectious diseases are caused by microscopical organisms bacteria viruses maybe fungi something like that well it's still humours and miasma at this point it's miasma and he's making a comeback.

Yes, I am.

I don't, it's not good when my stuff becomes really contemporary again.

I don't, it doesn't make me happy.

John Harvey himself,

as a boy, he claimed he had TB that he said lost his use of a lung.

Yes, apparently he caught tuberculosis and it made basically one of his lungs, his left lung, completely non-functional for the rest of his life.

And it certainly wasn't the only one of his diseases, I think, perhaps more important to his later life.

He really suffered from digestive disorders.

He developed colitis.

He developed an anal fissure.

And he said that passing a stall was like having barbed wire pulled through his anus.

Surely William was able to bully him about that.

Yeah.

Surely.

Will was busy having malaria, so

it is very time-consuming malaria.

That's a yeah, that's a in the top trumps.

I mean, one lung versus two lungs with malaria.

Yeah.

So it's a pretty crappy situation for poor little John Harvey.

He's having difficulty going to the toilet.

It's very painful.

And so he turned to religion.

it's not the sort of classic american baptist or you know or lutheran it's it's something called the seventh-day adventist yeah and religion was a huge part of the kellogg family life um obviously prayer is one of the interventions they're using to try and keep their kids healthy um and they converted to adventism and that was the reason why they went to battle creek because they wanted to live with a community of like-minded congregationalists this is in michigan this is in michigan yeah so it's the same state mormonism no mormonism is in utah isn't it yeah this is different okay all right john harvey's dad john preston they all there's a lot of familiar names here, so we're going to try and keep them apart.

So John Preston was

close to the spiritual leaders of the Adventists, and that's Ellen and James White.

And Ellen is the person who's really important to shaping the faith because she's regarded as a prophetess.

So she has visions that are basically the principles of Adventism.

One of those is that the second coming is coming really soon.

But the other is how to live a virtuous and healthy life, which is dietary advice, exercise advice, a diet of grains and vegetables.

It's vegetarianism.

It's no stimulating foods, nothing spicy, nothing fried, nothing pickled, no alcohol, no drugs, but also no wigs, no corsets, no tight dresses.

That's sadly annoying.

Well, you're not supposed to eat those anyway.

I never eat them.

You've never eaten a corset, Ed?

You haven't lived.

Delicious.

I find them very binding.

Hello.

All right, so John Harvey, as a sort of young boy growing into adolescence, you know, he believed that these indulgences, he believed they would lead to what particular indulgence, Ed?

Oh, now

it's self-pleasure, no?

It is, yeah, very good.

Well, I mean, eventually all roads lead there.

Yes, it is.

The idea here is that if you treat your body like that, you will have cravings for sex and masturbation.

You will become over-stimulated and seek out over-stimulating things in the world, particularly sex.

See, to me, it would be the other way around.

Surely, if you can seek adventure and excitement, perhaps in your food or even in the way you dress, whatever it is, that might divert your attention.

Whereas if you've got nothing, all you're eating is bland food that keeps you regular as clockwork.

So you don't even have any excitement about when that happens, you know, then what else are you going to do to pass the time?

They didn't have TV.

No, they didn't.

They didn't.

Ed, if you were starting a wellness cult now, and there's a lot of money in it, so maybe you should.

Well, there is.

What would you ban people from consuming?

I don't know.

It's got to be one of those things where it feels like it's going to be doing you good,

but it just won't hurt you.

I guess something I just don't particularly like.

Peas.

I'd ban peas.

Peas.

That I'd just be surrounded by like-minded people who would all come, who'd flock to me for the fact that they can be guaranteed.

No peas, no sweet corn.

So all those things that peas and sweet corn show up in uninvited.

No.

Hey, it's curry night.

We're following the religion of Edism.

So

we're not going to spend the first 10 minutes of curry night picking the peas out of our beef chamagne.

Sorry, chamaine is obviously not a curry.

It's your religion.

You can do what you like.

Wow, I've suddenly turned.

In this moment, I suddenly now see the appeal of starting your own cult.

You've made a monster.

Transforming the world as you wish to live in.

Vanessa.

Monge 2 will be allowed, because they are seen as the thin end of the wedge.

Anyone eating Monange 2 will be monitored closely.

Vanessa, how did Ellen White's spiritual beliefs and her visions influence little John Harvey Kellogg?

His relationship with the Adventist church and the faith does have its highs and lows over the rest of his life.

He doesn't always stick entirely to her spiritual rules, but he definitely absorbs a lot of these ideas about pure, simple living.

This is understandable because given if he's eating spicy and greasy food, this is actually going to be exacerbating his gastroenteral issues, so it has a practical function for him.

Ellen and James James White clearly identified John Harvey as this promising young man and they acted as mentors and supporters for his career going forward.

So at 12 they get him a job in their printing press so he's helping with their religious publications.

Will less influence and I think that might be because he was younger or he didn't get the same amount of tension and support from

the

gap significant gap between the two of them.

I will say we have to be quite wary about the childhood stories from these times.

John Harvey is not completely consistent in the tales that he tells tells about his childhood.

So like his vegetarianism, there's two different stories about why that happened.

One is he accidentally kills a robin and he's so distraught that he can't ever harm another animal.

But the other one is that Ellen White said, if you stop eating meat, you'll grow taller.

And he was anxious about his height.

And he says that's also one of the stories he tells.

That sounds more likely.

The first one sounds a bit like the George Washington shopping.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, these people didn't foresee the invention of the history podcast.

They did a thing, so they thought they could get away with it.

Very short-sighted.

What about formal education?

We haven't really heard about like school.

so the Kellogg senior were not that keen on sending their children to school, and that's partly because if you think the second coming is coming, there's not much point in sending your kids to school.

But they did get persuaded to send both of them.

John starts attending at the age of 10, he's immediately identified as this gifted child.

He starts to pursue a career in education, but Ellen White had a very different plan for him.

In 1872, she persuades him to go and pays for him to go and study medicine at Trials Hygiotherapeutic College.

This is a college that we would probably today say is teaching alternative medicine, so hydrotherapy and things like that.

At this point in the 19th century,

the legislation around medical qualifications is a lot looser and it's a lot easier to set up your own college and call yourself a doctor and not really any functional legislation that's going to do anything about that.

It's in the process of change.

Right into the 20th century, there would be quite a lot of doctors in America who would have had this sort of training rather than a more traditional form of medicine.

So hydrotherapy is like cold bath therapy, right?

Cold showers, cold baths.

Cold baths.

Sometimes it's also drinking the water as well.

It should be inside and outside.

And they wouldn't have been viewed at the time as alternative therapies as such.

It would be all considered just different versions of the mainstream, I imagine.

Well, it would depend a little bit, but no, they sometimes set themselves up as deliberately against contemporary medicines or university medicine, partly because we're pre-germ theory.

Contemporary medicine can't do a lot of good for a lot of diseases.

There aren't a lot of cures and therapies.

So actually the alternative people were able to say, well, your wound got infected, so therefore your doctor was no good.

Why don't you try water cues instead?

So they have this opportunity to step in where there's this gap in therapy, so that's why it was quite so popular.

Right, okay.

So, John Harvey attended Dr.

Troll's Hygieia Therapy Google, but he then has formal training later as well.

Yeah, he does.

So, he was not very impressed with the education he got from Dr.

Troll.

He thought it was a bit of a waste of time, and a bit of a, he calls it a bogus diploma, and he doesn't ever sort of mention it when he talks about his certificates later on.

But he manages to persuade the whites to continue funding his education.

He actually goes and takes some courses in medicine at the University of Michigan, and then he manages to go to Bellevue Medical Hospital all the way out in New York City and that's where he's taking as many classes in medicine but also in medical science as he can possibly manage.

Okay, so he's classically trained as a doctor.

Yes he is and he's alternatively trained.

He's technically seen both sides.

His diet as a student, Ed, do you know what he was eating every day?

Scrambled eggs.

Boiled eggs.

Boiled eggs.

No.

For me it was fried eggs and I'm thinking well he can't fry stuff so boiled eggs

would have been the

And at the weekend, potatoes.

Would he be allowed to mash it?

Would that be considered too off the ball?

I mean, that sounds very sexy.

Mashed potatoes, doesn't it?

No, the diet he...

Anything soft enough to put your genitals in is off the table.

Listeners, please don't do that.

No, he was eating every day two apples and seven crackers per meal.

Well, it just sounds like what you've got left back of the cupboard.

Yeah, what you found on a train.

Yeah.

So Vanessa, while John was sort of

for how long was he living on that?

Well sort of two, three years I guess what we studied.

I think you survived for two or three years on just apples and crackers.

I guess he's probably eating other stuff.

I think I think that well we know this because he later talks about oats that'll come up later.

So we know he's having other stuff as well.

Again, John's stories.

Yeah.

So Vanessa, while John Harvey Kellogg is off at med school, Little Will is doing what?

He's not treated as the brightest kid, but they do still send him to school.

They still think it's a waste of time and probably even more for him because he does not do so well academically.

Although I think, to be fair, that might be because he's struggling having to go to school with also having a job.

So from the age of six, he's working in his parents' broom factory.

Oh, my word.

And by 12, he's so good at it that he's become a factory floor supervisor for a team of other boys working on brooms.

Yeah, but at the end of the day, Nepo, baby.

Exactly.

That's the problem with the broom industry.

I've always said it.

It's shown up, it is.

Well, he may have been better than his dad, actually.

At 14, they've got him out on the road selling stuff, and that's really where Will blooms.

He is an excellent salesman, but he's also really good at the numbers and good at the maths and good at the business studies and the logistics.

So he manages to get to go to Parsons Business College in Kalamazoo, also in Michigan.

And he, this is in 1880, and he therefore qualifies as a bookkeeper and an accountant.

So business studies, basically.

Yeah, so he's sort of come good, actually.

Yeah, he worked his way out from the factory floor.

What were you doing at 12 professionally, Ed?

Were you?

Professionally?

Oh, what?

Babysitting?

Oh, okay.

I did a lot of babysitting for the neighbours.

Yeah.

Yeah.

At way below the minimum wage.

And it was a very junior babysitter position in that if the babies woke up, I was basically a baby monitor.

That was essentially before baby monitors were.

One of those little cameras that just says, your baby is awake.

I would just come and yeah, Kira's awake.

That was my first job.

All right, so Will did get to go to university and he had the willpower to educate himself against his dad's wishes, which is always very nice.

Let's get back to John.

Um, what did he do with his fresh out of the cereal box medical degree?

Did he go and practice medicine?

So, after his studies, he goes back to Battle Creek, and this is what Ellen and James White had planned for him all along.

They get him to run their Western Health Reform Institute because it's struggling, that's why they sent him to study medicine in the first place.

He reorganises it, he reinvents it, he focuses on what he considers a healthy diet as well as the hydrotherapy that they were already doing.

In 1877, he renames it the Battle Creek Sanatorium.

I'm saying sanatorium, not sanitarium, because he wanted to distinguish it from the other institutes.

But it quickly becomes nicknamed the San to save any effort.

And it thrives.

And by 1880, he needs a new manager.

And so he turns and offers the job to his brother, Will.

Reunited at last.

He invented sanatorium as a word, didn't he?

No.

No, or did he not?

No, he says he did.

He claimed to.

There's some evidence that people were already using it before him, which again, classic John.

This guy.

There was this sudden explosion of all of these companies companies.

They all have the same names and then they all change names like six different times.

And it's the sanatorium company for flakes, the flake sanatorium company, the brand flake sanit company, the Battle Creek Flake Company and so on.

So it can be quite hard to untangle.

It's very multi-they, yes.

And then they steal everybody's ideas.

So who knows?

Yeah.

Okay, so John and Will are now working together at the Battle Creek Sanatorium, nicknamed the San.

Will is in charge of the bookkeeping.

He's the accountant.

And John is in charge of the patients, I guess, their health stuff.

He's the doctor.

Do the brothers now get on?

They're now both in their 20s or 30s, I guess.

No, things are still really bad between the two brothers.

Will had to work at the sand for seven years, doing 18-hour days, including working Christmas, before he was allowed to take two weeks off for vacation.

He's paid really badly, and that's partly because the sand is associated still with the church.

So a lot of people are working voluntarily or for low wages because it's church work.

How well is John doing out of it at this point?

Well, John technically isn't paying himself out the sand.

He is paying himself out the publications he's putting out and Will is running his publication company.

So that's the other side of the business that they're also breaking up.

He's a sort of health author.

He's kind of putting out pamphlets and so on.

You can't know everything.

But why is William doing this?

William sounds like he's a very qualified business person.

Why has he gone to work for no money with the brother that he hates

him?

It's harder to know because it's harder to get access to Will's personal papers than it is John Kellogg, who wrote a lot of his stuff down.

The guess would be that it's still family loyalty and also possibly post-traumatic stress from being in Bully, but this is what he's used to.

This is the relationship he's used to.

It's sad, isn't it?

But the other thing I do love about John, he has a rotating staff of men to...

Well, you tell us.

Yeah, so this is the publishing house.

So the publishing house that's on is putting out journals and newspapers and books and pamphlets and nearly all of that is stuff from John Harvey himself.

And the way he managed it was by having a team of men who would be with him at all times, writing down everything that he said.

And then that would go to Will to make into beautiful prose to go into the publication.

Do you guys not have one of those?

No, I mean,

we all have those.

Oh, everybody in the comments.

That's how you're writing a new show every year, right?

Yeah, yeah, that's absolutely.

I mean, mine aren't with me today because once it reaches over 28 degrees, I give you a deal.

Very kind.

They overheat.

Oh, I see.

Malfunction.

And is it your brother that you use for this?

Yeah, yeah.

I used to.

Because this is the thing between the colours is that Will got the worst shifts.

So if John...

Oh, he was part of the teacher.

Oh, yeah, he was part of the teacher.

So if John wanted to dictate a chapter at three in the morning or when he's on the toilet, that's Will's shift to go in a list.

It's like a wisdom stenographer.

You're just following a man around as he says, I think diets is very important.

And sometimes he's on a bicycle as well, just to make it difficult.

I mean, I guess this is before you had the notes app on your iPhone.

Sure.

I mean, obviously,

women had jobs in these days.

Would the idea of having a woman on staff be completely out of the question?

No, there are plenty of women on staff.

There are women working as nurses.

But

on his staff of people to write down.

Not taking the notes, no.

No.

Because women can't write it, as we all know.

Fill their heads with ideas above their station.

No, you won't be able to understand.

No, and there have been women doctors, I think, in the Hygieia that he's Dr.

Troll's.

Yes, he's been trained by a female doctor as well.

This is the thing about the American system, because it's so open, actually, women were able to be doctors because you could qualify in a lot of different ways.

In some ways, it's a more equal system.

Yeah, it was more progressive than Britain, wasn't it, at the time?

Let's talk about the treatments you could receive at the San Sanatorium.

Colonel Garrigation, come on.

I've got a little mini quiz for you, Ed, actually, because we've got a few options here.

One of these is not true, okay?

You could have been off.

Only one of these is not true.

I could have been on unbelievable truth.

Yeah, exactly.

Sorry.

Got to steal the format from somewhere.

Being shaken on a vibrating chair, yogurt enemas, circumcision, light wave baths, coffee intravenous drips, and sexual abstinence.

Which of these was not offered as a treatment to patients at the sand?

Coffee intravenous drips, surely.

Very good.

Look at that.

That's a stimulant.

It's a stimulant.

Yeah, yeah, well done.

But being shaken on a vibrating chair, Vanessa, and...

Well, I mean, they'd still do that.

That was a big thing with the 70s health farms, was just standing there and being vibrated with a strap that wobbled your arrows.

That was a digestive thing, right?

To try and get the old bowels shifting.

It was, yeah, it's a stimulation to try and move the bowels because the real focus of the sand at this point is on digestive health.

I mean, there's a lot going on.

By 1900, this is an incredibly large institution.

It has about 700 patients.

It has 1,000 staff.

It has 400 acres of farmland.

It has luxurious suites of patient wings.

This is full modern plumbing.

It's electric lighting, all of that sort of stuff.

It also has a full hospital, operating theatre, scientific analysis laboratory.

It has an orchestra.

It has regular choir evenings for entertainment.

You've got to have an orchestra.

You've got to have an orchestra.

There's all the baths, there's the light baths, there's massive dining rooms, there is a full experimental kitchen.

And that's because the real focus here is on the diet.

So it's being run on the Seventh-day Adventist principles.

So that is vegetarian diet.

vigorous exercise, no drugs, no alcohol, no tobacco, no tight corsets, no sex.

And that includes no solo sex, absolutely no masturbation.

And John is actually advocating the use of corrosive acids and circumcision as treatments for people who can't give up masturbating while they're standing there.

So that's problematic.

How are you monitoring that?

That's the question.

Me personally, I don't think I would.

I would not mention it, but it's putting the fear into people so much that they will tell you they're doing it because they want to be cured of it.

Or it's reporting.

Oh, yeah, it just was if you convince them enough.

Yeah, and

people are paying to come to this facility, right?

It's quite an expensive place to come and come.

And celebrities come, presidents come, like luxurious, yeah.

Because you're going to pay all that money to come and stay.

You don't want to stay and come.

Oh, I didn't mention the yogurt.

So, yogurt, it's hydrotherapy light bars, but it's mostly diet.

And what John thinks is really important is that the food mustn't stagnate inside you.

You mustn't have rotting food in your body.

It has to pass through really quickly.

So you eat this particular diet that's spices where it's allowed.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That would have been.

Yeah.

Because it's an accelerant.

Yeah.

So yogurt enemas.

Yogurt enemas, if it doesn't come out fast enough, aim for four bowel movements a day.

And if all else fails, vibration to vibration.

And chew your food 40 times.

Is it Fletcherism, this thing, is it?

Yes.

So that's named after the health guru Horace Fletcher.

So you have to chew your food each bite of food at least 40 times to sort of pre-digest it before it gets into your stomach.

So

you shoot straight through.

And when you say light baths, he was fascinated by exposure to light.

So he was bathing people in light, which at the time felt like a new science.

Yeah,

this is partly why they had such good electricity because he needed it to run all these gadgets and gizmos that they had as their therapeutics.

But it's also kind of marketing because a lot of the sanatoria would have been in sunnier places and it was for curing TB.

But obviously, where he's based, you don't necessarily have nice sun all year round.

So, one way of getting around that is effectively to have a sad lab to have indoor lighting as well.

Come to Michigan, it's dark and overcast, but we have a lab, but not indoors.

Okay, Ed, would you have voluntarily gone to one of these health farms in the night?

I'm a nightmare, just even thinking about it.

And I'm not, you know, I'm not going to go into detail on the thing that really puts me off at the most.

But, yeah, a vegetarian diet.

I mean, I've never been to any kind of a retreat of this nature.

You know, I do find something where

everything is dictated to is

like, I don't even like it when you go to a hotel and you have, and it's a buffet.

I kind of feel like that's, it just, it just feels a bit too communal.

You know what I mean?

I like a menu I can order from.

Well, you get a menu, you get a specifically tailored menu.

John Harvey would design one for you that would tell you exactly what you want.

Whether you have grains before you have your yogurt or yogurt and then grains.

And then you have to take them your samples to make sure it's working for you.

Oh so you're doing the poo samples.

Oh yeah, the whole gastric acid samples.

Oh wow.

I mean people are still doing versions of this.

You can send

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Send off your poo sample to people who will then send you eight in inverted commas tailored diet.

Okay, so a fairly, fairly wacky.

I mean, some of this is kind of sensible science and exercise diet, whatever, good.

And some of this is bonkers stuff.

We have to obviously talk about John Harvey Kellogg's pretty nasty views, which are fairly typical of the era, but he was particularly keen on eugenics, and he went further than some.

Yeah, he was a supporter of eugenics.

And this can seem confusing to some people because, obviously, he's also advocating all these lifestyle diet, the sort of nurture side of nature and nurture changes.

And also because the stand itself could look like quite a racially progressive institution.

There's no real racial segregation there.

He had some very high-profile clients, including the abolitionist Sergeina Truth, but he also had African-American nurses and doctors working and training there.

But he also believed in the supremacy of the white race and he thought that we should be tactically breeding better men and women.

And these are his words, like horses, cows, and pigs.

So he organises and hosts a series of national conferences on race betterment at the San.

The first of these is in 1913.

And he's a strong advocate of what we call positive eugenics, but that's where you try and encourage some people to have more kids, but also supported negative eugenics, which is where you try and stop people from having children through sterilization if necessary.

And it's probably relevant that Michigan did pass these eugenical laws about sterilization, compulsory sterilization, in 1923, and he supported them.

And because of the way that it's defined, it's looking for what they called mental defectives and degenerates, and it's tied into the criminal justice system.

consequence of that it's disproportionately forcibly sterilizing people from poor and particularly non-white backgrounds in Michigan.

Are you going to come to me now for my hilarious take on that?

Yeah, Ed, if you could just follow that up with a hilarious banger, that'd be great.

No, I mean, it's obviously it's, you know,

there's an awful lot of eugenicists in this time of history, some of them quite progressive in other ways.

And I hate to say this, but again, something else that seems to be making a bit of a comeback.

Yeah.

Doesn't it, Just?

Yes.

Okay, so we've met the Kellogg brothers.

We've met the Kellogg father and mother, but we need to meet the Kwags, Kellogg wives and girlfriends.

Right, so Will got married, John got married?

Yeah, so Will has a fairly conventional family life.

It's much more modelled on his dad.

He got married just before he got the job at the sand to Ella, who he refers to as Puss.

And like his father's first marriage, they have five children together, although three of those die really, really young.

And he and Puss are together for about 20 years before Puss dies in sort of her early 50s.

He then gets married actually to a woman, Doctor, Carrie, for the rest of his life.

John Harvey's family is not conventional.

He does get married.

This is with Ella Ella Eaton Kellogg, and he's married to her for 41 years, but they never have children of their own.

And this is apparently because John's belief that sex would enervate him, it would drain and sap his energy, meant that they never consummated their marriage.

Instead, they fostered 42 orphaned children.

It doesn't chime with his eugenics then, you know, and the idea of wanting the right people to have more children.

Yeah, so this is the problem.

John's views on these sorts of things do change over time.

And there is some suggestion that he fostered this many children and they were all poor orphans, and that some of them

were from ethnic minorities as well.

And the part of the idea was possibly to show that if they were nurtured properly and raised properly, they would all become great citizens.

And because some of them did not have great outcomes, that might have actually hardened some of his more

eugenical.

Oh, I see.

So he started with good intentions, and then he was like, ah, look.

Yeah, it was a proof of principle there for that many kids.

That's sad.

Well, that's him going, well, it can't be that I have failed.

Yeah.

It's their genetics has failed.

Yes, it's fair.

And therefore,

yeah,

it would have been, no, seriously, that would have been like a purely ego-driven ideological path he went down.

It's not that nurture can overcome nature.

It's not that nurture can't overcome.

It's just that it obviously can't because

he wouldn't admit to his own, that his own system failed.

His system was perfect.

And if it didn't work, then therefore nature was king.

That's depressing, isn't it?

I think we should highlight his wife,

who is not only raising these 42 orphan children,

you think how altruistic of them, but then you think, oh no, he's not the one actually raising them.

Yeah, so Ella, his wife, or you know, fostering all these children, also dealing with him.

She's also the key filliger in the experimental kitchen.

So she's writing books on recipe books and health advice books, particularly for mothers.

And she's also inventing new foods, just like they did.

So I think the most important one for her is Protos, which is probably one of the first branded vegetarian meat substitutes and was currently really quite delicious and sold really, really well.

How delicious if there was no spices allowed?

It's mostly made of peanuts.

Oh, okay.

Well, I'm allergic to peanuts, so I can't have that.

So there we go.

All right, so she's...

I'm going to stop for a second.

You were going to say peas.

Oh, there we go.

The Eggburn cult finds a new member.

Okay, so we're talking about food innovators in several ways, which means we need to talk about the breakfast cereal market.

Because so far we haven't really talked about breakfast.

And that's why we're here.

We're here for breakfast.

How, why did the brothers break into the cereal market?

Again, so they have an experimental kitchen at the sand, which is really useful for them.

And John's story, and we have to again take it with a pinch of salt, is that when he's at medical school in New York...

A pinch of salt allowed?

No, no, no, no.

A sprinkling of oats.

A sprinkling of oats.

Yeah.

I don't think we're going to popularize that as a new phrase.

So John's story that might be apocryphal about why he got into cereals was that when he was having this terrible diet as a student in New York, he wanted to find something that was quick and easy for breakfast.

And there were, in theory, pre-prepared oats, but you still had to cook them for quite a long time.

And apparently, it was just too much.

He's looking for no-cook breakfast, basically.

He is not the only one.

There are a lot of doctors and entrepreneurs who are all trying to think about this same sort of easy breakfast morning product that's also healthy and made of grains and things like that.

His key inspiration is probably granular.

And granular is made by the doctor Jacob Caleb Jackson, who also ran a health institute that was the inspiration for the whites to set up their health institute.

And granular is this baked whole wheat flour crispy bits that have to be soaked overnight to become edible.

So they're not really quick cook.

So John and Will are kind of experimenting with different sorts of flours and grains to try and make an easier version of this.

And eventually they have this mix of wheat and oat and corn.

They bake at high temperatures, they crumble it up.

It still needs soaking for a couple of hours, so it's not immediate, but it's still slightly slightly better.

Still less hassle than chia seeds.

And they market this under the name, the really brand new name of granola.

So granula.

No is genuinely a brand new name.

Obviously, your granula is already a boat.

So they change one letter.

Yeah.

They complete the U, turn into an O.

It's a brand new food.

But we haven't got to cornflakes.

So, how do we get corn flakes?

Because I know there are multiple stories of how they come up with it.

Okay, so the key step for cornflake making here, I'm not going to do too much science, but there's a little bit, which is tempering.

So you soak this, whatever you're using, and then you boil it, and then you sort of put it into a sheet.

And it's that drying out as a sheet that means that the moisture in it is evened out and it becomes easy to bake and flake.

So that's the essential thing.

Bake and flake.

John's story, happy accident, he's playing about at home, gets called away to the sand, forgets what he's working on, leaves it overnight, and when he comes back and tries out, he suddenly realises, ah, a miracle has happened and now it flakes really easily.

And that's the discovery of how you make cornflakes.

Will says actually it was the two of them deliberately working working on it in the experimental kitchen, and that the mash was left for a lot longer and had become moldy, but they didn't want to waste it, so they tried flaking it, baking and flaking it, and then they realised it worked really well.

And then John wrote up a whole series of experiments for him to try, and Will put in 120-hour weeks in order to try and perfect this particular method.

There is a third story, and that's Ella's story, and she says it all came to John in a dream.

Like Paul McCartney with yesterday, but

sort of breakfast flakes.

Okay, so three different stories.

I'm going to go with the second one there.

I'm going to go with William's version of events.

You're going to go with the brothers spending hundreds of hours just doing it.

I mean, that's how most foods are made, right?

You just, you know.

I mean, that's oftentimes how my dinner is made.

Many, many hours spent trying to work on it.

Okay, so we've got three different takes.

That's interesting.

Ed's deciding on the brothers working together, which I think feels plausible to me.

So John feels like a serial liar because he's writing the brother out of the story, isn't he?

Vanessa, do we have a sort of instant breakfast revolution in America?

Actually, yes.

It is a massive boom time for serial entrepreneurs, basically.

So

John applies for a patent for the process for making these flaked corn pieces, which is granted to him on the 14th of April 1896.

And only him, he doesn't put Will's name on the patent application.

You get the story here.

But it was good to get the patent because they'd actually already gone all in on producing this stuff.

The previous year in 1895, Will had set up the factory for making granos, as they called it, and they were churning out 113 pounds of

corn.

That's what they were calling cornflakes.

Granos.

So 113,000 pounds.

113,000 pounds.

Which is what in tons?

I'm not a pounds guy.

60 tons?

Three elephants.

I don't know.

Double deck of buses, times nine.

Yeah, 113,000 pounds.

Are you a pounds guy?

No, I only know things in terms of Olympic size swimming pools.

That's nine units of

measurement.

That's the milk, not the cereal, right?

Yeah.

And then when you get bigger, it's the size size of whales.

It's what proportion of whales are how many.

But okay, so they're making an absolute some metric ton of breakfast cereal, okay.

And there's literally a hundred other companies doing similar things.

Yeah, yeah, they're not alone.

And Battle Creek becomes this hub for cereal production by 1900.

There's over a hundred companies there all trying to make cereals.

Some of them are innovating, some of them are just copying each other, some of them are literally stealing each other's ideas.

Quite good names.

Yeah, so the ones actually in Battle Creek, some of them are familiar.

Grape nuts are going to come out of Battle Creek, but also the first really sugary cereals like maple flakes, which are made with maple syrup to make them sweet.

But outside of Battle Creek, there's ones which have very forceful names, like well, force, vim, things like that.

Zest.

Zest.

Yes.

Would you eat Vim?

No, no, no.

Didn't Vim become a, well, that was like a bleach, wasn't it?

Maybe, maybe.

I feel, I feel like this.

Yeah, we've looked into it.

Vim is a scouring powder with added bleach.

Lovely.

But the most crucial thing we have to say, of of course, is they were making these with wheat.

Yeah.

And then Will goes, hang on a second, corn.

Yeah.

So Will really wants to go for nationwide advertising and getting this product out there.

And John says, no, I'm not interested.

It was just that wheat at the time was the dominant sort of crop.

Ah, so no.

Will wants them to switch, and when we say, he wants them to switch to corn, and we mean maize, just to be emphatic, it's American corn, not.

British corn.

So Will wants them to switch to corn because it's easier to handle and it's sweeter and it just tastes better than wheat.

And John says no, because he thinks wheat is really healthy and that corn is not healthy.

Because corn tastes nicer than wheat and therefore you just, yeah.

My wife has a term for things that taste like they're good for you.

It's like, tastes very worthy.

It's her subtle way of saying, I don't like the taste of this, but I'm sure it's good for me.

Could we launch worthy flakes?

Worthy flakes.

I'm getting a sense here that the brothers are still at loggerheads.

You know, John is removing Will from all the patent law and all the kind of, he writes him out of the stories, and then they're disagreeing on what they should make it out of.

Are they still able to work together?

No.

Will decides he has enough and he leaves his job at the sand in 1901.

Unfortunately, six months later, the sand burns down and he gets roped back into the rebuild, the massive rebuild that John has planned.

Poor Will, he was free.

He was free and then he was sucked right back in again.

Just one more job.

I think I'm out there.

Pull money back in.

How do we know he wasn't the one who burnt it down?

Oh, hello.

He definitely got motive.

There are many rumors, but it was probably the really complex electric plant just had a bit of a spark.

I was going to say,

it's probably the kind of machines in there that are sort of too much vibrating and too many electrical lights, too many circumcision machines.

I don't know.

Okay, so it burned down.

Will came back in, but then he goes on his own.

He's like, I'm going to launch my own

serial.

Are you sure they didn't just slack off on the no-masturbation rule and everybody

that

friction just caused it?

or is that how they put it out?

Sorry.

Sorry.

Sorry.

Radio four, come on.

We're in the desert island disc studio.

This is hallowed ground.

Vanessa.

You know, Will launches his own company, which will become known as the company that is now famous as the Kellogg's Company, but that's not what he calls it to begin with.

No, so in 1906, February, he launches the Battle Creek Toasted Cornflake Company, a really catchy name.

Yeah, yeah, I mean I can see why he didn't stick with that.

He changes the name of the

food he's making to the Sanitus Toasted Cornflake to Corn Crisp with a K, and then finally Kellogg Cornflakes.

And then he changes the name in the company to match it in 1909 to Kellogg Toasted Cornflake Company, which becomes the Kellogg Company in 1922.

Quite a lot of rebrands.

Yes.

So he landed on eventually just his own name as the brand name.

Was that

had his name become because of the sanatorium and stuff like that, had his name become a famous name or did the name become famous after the cereal became manufactured?

Great question, right?

So the Kellogg name was known as associated with health food products and with the sand and with all the publications that John was putting out, but their food company was called the Sanitas Company, not the Kellogg Food Company.

And this is the source of a lot of the conflict that they had.

So it would have the Kellogg name on it, but that wasn't the brand name they were using.

And so, I mean, John being a super chill guy, as he was, he reacted to his brother sort of launching a rival business in typical fashion.

He was, you know, very, very relaxed about it.

He sued him.

For using what is also his own name, right?

He sued him for control of the family name.

What legal framework does he have there?

Because Kellogg...

Will's called Kellogg, he's allowed to use his name.

Yeah, a lot of it is to do with the use of the signature on the box and the branding name.

And basically, the two brothers get kind of locked into this series of suit and countersuit against each other, and what I think we can probably call some quite petty recriminations.

So, John starts copying Will's advertising style, and then when John starts making brand cereal, Will brings out all brand and brand flakes in response.

Will wins the case out of an out-of-court settlement in 1911, so he has the right to use the Kellogg brand, but John Harvey doesn't stop with this process and brings yet another suit against him.

And then finally, it's not until 1917 when Will actually succeeds in fully winning back the entire brand name.

He can use Kellogg, and his brother cannot use Kellogg in the branding anywhere at all.

So he wins out in the end.

Yeah.

And so if John hadn't sued William, he probably still could have used his name in the world.

Yeah, that's true.

That was the agreement they reached sort of in 1911, but he continued to pursue Terra Raspato.

And Will, how are you feeling about all that bullying now?

Yeah, exactly.

Stick that up your already damaged art.

I mean, we have to say, Will is obviously, you know, he's a food pioneer in some ways.

He's also an advertising genius.

He's one of the sort of early great pioneers of marketing to a mass media world, isn't he?

You know, he's doing

mascots and branding and decorative boxes.

Absolutely.

And that might be why he's better in court than John, that he actually presents much better and is much better at persuading.

But he does these huge-scale advertising things.

Like he put up what was at the time the world's biggest billboard in Times Square in London, in London, in New York.

Be good if it was impressive, it was in London.

The Times Square in New York in 1912, he invented the concept of putting toys inside the package to lure kids in.

And he also, he had these amazing advertising schemes that he particularly targeted towards women who were doing most of the grocery shopping.

He had these glossy full-page adverts in women's magazine, like

Ladies' Home Journal and things like that.

And his innovation wasn't just advertising.

It was also, he was really good at inventing new technology for making cereals and developing cereals.

But he also got really early on into things like time and motion studies and stuff we call call scientific management.

He just had a really good business brain, basically.

So tell me he got incredibly rich by the end of it.

Yes.

Yes, incredibly rich.

He's sort of the

Henry Ford of food, isn't he?

In some ways, he's kind of almost kind of the industrial.

Yeah, and they were friends with Henry Ford.

Yeah.

Okay.

And he also came up with Snap, Crackle and Pop,

his invention.

So he's really pioneering in terms of how to sell a product as well as how to make it.

Well, that's been a Kellogg's sort of thing, hasn't it?

Where of whatever just a side effect that they can't get rid of, they sell it as a virtue.

So they're like, they probably went, okay, I mean, this stuff tastes all right and it's good for you, but it makes a funny noise when you put milk in it.

Why don't we sell that as a bonus?

I was like, oh, no,

that's the elvish characters coming to life in the cereal.

It was the same thing with, you know, it was Coco Pups.

They're so chocolatey, they turn the milk brown.

You know, that was after months of going, how do we stop this cereal turning the milk brown?

Yeah.

No, we say it's a good thing.

It's a feature, not a bug.

Yeah, yeah.

I feel at this point I should probably do a sort of impartial BBC voice and chase, just say other breakfast cereals are available because my producers are.

Unfortunately, we have chosen to concentrate on one particular company.

I don't think I'm showing them in a great light.

I am having a pop with them.

Actually, very quickly, Ed, we can show you, I think, just a little image, I think.

Turn that over for us.

This is a lovely advert from the Kellogg's company.

Do you want to describe it for the listeners?

Well,

I feel like I'm looking at it through

steamed-up glasses.

It's got a very sort of ethereal

look to it.

It seems to be a woman hugging,

it looks like, I guess it's a plant, I guess it's a maize plant.

You remember that thing of Trump when he was hugging the American flag?

It's a similar kind of pose to that.

And it's headed The Sweetheart of the Corn.

Is she a personification of the cornflake production process?

Yeah, is she a mum?

She's an ideal purchaser.

See, she's buying this help for her family and apparently having an affair with an ear of maize.

I was going to say it's almost

the same height as her.

So it's almost like they're dating and she's...

Well, it's got its arms around her as well.

Okay.

Okay, where does our story end then for the battling brothers, Vanessa?

You said that they're suing and counter-suing, and eventually Will wins the right to have the Kellogg name and his brand.

Do they ever reconcile?

Do they ever get together at Christmas and go, oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I love you really?

Unfortunately, not.

There isn't a happy ending here.

John gradually gives up control of the sand through the 1920s.

It's sold off to the US government in 1942, and he dies in Battle Creek in 1943 at the grand old age, it has to be said, of 91.

So some of his lifestyle was very effective.

He leaves his entire state to the Race Betterment Foundation.

Oh, John.

Come on.

See, that bit's not a happy ending.

No.

I mean, for those of us who see John as the bad guy and William as the good guy, you could argue that their lack of,

what's the word I'm looking for?

Their lack of reconciliation is actually, you know, that is a good thing.

It's certainly helpful that one of them is like an, you know, just still team eugenics all the way, and the other guy is giving money to charity and generally being quite a useful industrialist.

Yeah, because, I mean, Will spends lots of time at his massive horse farm in ranch in California, but he also dies at the same age, 91, in Battle Creek.

He had set up a philanthropic organisation about 20 years earlier, which is the W.K.

Kellogg Foundation, and he leaves all of his estate to that.

And it's a foundation that particularly looks at challenges facing children and childhood development and children's charities.

And obviously, Kellogg's is still here today.

I'd like to think that

as a counterpoint to the eugenics, that he ran his horse farm in a way where he didn't breed, he just let them fall in love with each other.

He didn't put any thought whatsoever into breeding better, stronger horses.

He just let the horses just find their own partners.

Polyamorous horses, just chilling out.

Yeah.

Yeah, so there we go.

So that's the end of the family story.

And as you say, the corporation obviously is still going pretty strong.

The nuance window!

Time now for the nuance window.

This is the part of the show where Ed and I sit quietly for two minutes while Dr.

Vanessa takes to the factory floor to tell us something we need to know about the Kellogg brothers.

My stopwatch is ready.

Take it away, Vanessa.

So I want to introduce a concept to try and understand the Kellogg's and the sand, which is techno-solutionism.

That is faith in technological innovations to solve all our problems, including our social problems.

It might seem counterintuitive for John Harvey Kellogg and the Sam, because they're part of this broader health reform movement.

It tends to talk about nature rather than necessarily science.

It's a response to anxieties about modern life in industrialised capitalist cities.

There's been very rapid social change.

People aren't living, eating, working the same way that they had even a generation ago.

The move from rural to city living had disconnected people from their foodways.

They don't know where the food's being grown, how it's being transported, if the packet is truthful about what's inside it.

And although we're having fewer deaths, perhaps from things like cholera and plague and smallpox, we're now having new mysterious modern diseases, particularly amongst the middle classes, particularly amongst those who work in offices, headaches, digestive disorders, fatigue, stress, anxiety.

And modern medicine doesn't have at this point a lot to offer to those people.

And that's where the doctors, health reformers, and entrepreneurs step in, not to reform society, but to offer these lifestyle changes, these new diets, these new regimes, these new health resorts to deal with these problems.

A lot of them use a rhetoric not only of naturalness but also the past, so looking nostalgically back to how we used to live a generation ago, but also even further, looking to anatomy, biology, evolution to say how we should live and how we should live in a healthy way.

The past will cure modernity.

But that relationship is complicated when you bring the science in because science and technology can make society too fast, it can process our food, but it can also enable us to make a lovely, healthy, digestible cornflake and we can have now sunbaths in the middle of winter.

So people like John Harvey Kellogg don't want us to go back to that pre-industrial life.

They don't want us to live like the people he called primitive savages.

Instead, he wants to use technology to solve these problems.

Our stomachs can't handle modern life, so let's use technology to pre-digest our food for us, and then we can move through the modern world perhaps more like a machine hybrid, a cyborg, than a natural animal for this new, exciting modern world.

Amazing.

Two minutes on the dot.

Look at that.

Bang on.

Thank you so much.

Techno-solutionism.

So it's the opposite of the paleo diet, right?

It's, you know,

he's not saying stone age, stone age, he's going future.

Yeah, he's looking more to the future, but it's still the same people who are also saying, oh, but we're using the science of evolution to prove that our diets are therefore appropriate.

Yeah, fair enough.

Interesting stuff, isn't it?

Yeah, I mean, I have to say, I'm someone who has...

I'm more so into eating now, but as a kid, I just found eating food was just something I didn't, something I had to do and I never wanted to do.

I never had much of an appetite.

So I've always dreamed and looked forward to this future where we would have pills for breakfast.

Oh, yeah.

You know, and I'm still, I'm more annoyed by that than rocket packs.

We all thought we'd be flying around in chat packs.

Where's my hoverboard?

Exactly.

No, I'm none of that bothers me as much as the idea that we had just pop a pill and that would do us for the day.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, there we go.

So, what do you know now?

Well, it's time now for the say, What do you know now?

It's our quick fire quiz for Edge.

I have written, do you know what I've written down?

John Harvey Kellogg's, William Keith.

I didn't even write Kellogg's down.

That's it.

And Seventh-day Adventists.

That's it.

That's my notes.

Well, there was so much coming at me.

All right.

As soon as I write something down, I'll miss the next thing.

It's fun.

I mean, some comedians write reams and reams and reams, and some just go.

No, no, just commit it to memory.

We'll find out.

I haven't committed anything to memory right now.

Okay, well, I've got 10 questions for you.

Question one: What was the name of the...

I cannot get into this job to have to work.

It's hard.

Come on, sorry.

Okay.

Question one: What was the name of the town where John and Will Kellogg lived and worked and set up the sanatorium?

Battle Creek.

It is in Michigan.

Well done.

I remember that because it does sound like a level on

Call of Duty.

Question two: How did a doctor attempt to cure the father's axe wound when they were kids?

Oh, no, stitch it up and cover it with leather and just occasionally wash it with carbolic soap.

Very good.

Well done.

Question three.

Which Christian religious tradition did John belong to?

Seven of the Adventists.

Write that down.

Write it down.

Question four.

What nickname was given to the Health Institute run by John Harvey Kellogg and his brother?

Oh, the sanatorium.

And the short, the nickname was?

The San.

The San.

Yep, very good.

Question five, can you name two cures that were offered by John at the San?

Yogurt Enemas

and abstinence.

Yes, absolutely.

Abstaining from particularly from self-pleasure.

Exactly as well.

I don't know why that one just keeps sticking in my head.

Plus the shaking machine, light baths, chewing your food 40 times

and vegetarian diet.

Question six, how old was Will when he became a supervisor in his father's broom-making factory?

He started working there when he was six.

Yeah?

And supervisor by...

Was he supervisor by 12?

He was, well, I'm remembered.

And he was out on the road at 14 as the head of sales.

You could say he cleaned up.

It's a broom factory.

Cleaned up.

Hello?

Question seven.

What was the name of John's wife, who helped to pioneer various meat substitutes?

Do you remember it was a sort of...

Yeah, I know she was a doctor.

Yeah.

Oh, no.

I'm sorry.

Sorry.

It was something eaten Kellogg.

Oh, very good.

Ella eaten the Kellogg.

Question eight.

Ella claimed John invented cornflakes after having a dream.

How did Will Keith Kellogg say that he invented it?

Oh, he said that they basically worked on it together for hundreds of hours.

Yeah, absolutely.

In the same kitchen.

You're doing very well.

Question nine.

Why did you quite please with me?

Oh, I mean, honestly, I could get the rest of them wrong now.

I still feel like I've done all right.

Eight out of ten would be a very solid score.

But ten out of ten is within reach.

You can do it.

I believe in you.

Question nine.

Why did John sue Will in 1906?

For using the Kellogg name.

Yeah, and his new cereal business.

And this for a perfect round.

10 out of 10.

On the way.

Apart from Ella, I mean, I did forget.

I'll come on.

I gave you that.

It's fine.

Question 10.

Name two of Will's innovations in the production and advertising of cereal.

The toy in a box.

Yep.

And the glossy adverts in magazines.

Yeah, very good.

Very, very good.

You could have mascots and automation and all sorts of.

But yeah, 10 out of 10, Ed Burn, never in doubt.

Come on.

Absolutely rocks it.

It started off like a nightmare that I was like, oh my god, I'm being tested.

Let me just check.

I have trousers on.

And then this goes

boycane good.

Boycame good.

You're not naked at school.

Not yet.

Well, thank you, Vanessa, for

putting it all into

easy bite-sized, appropriately enough information, easily digestible.

Ah, there we go.

Lovely.

Lovely.

Thank you so much.

Thank you so much, Vanessa.

If you want more from Vanessa, check out our episode on Victorian bodybuilding and the one on the Northwest Passage, both fascinating.

And for more American entrepreneurs, why not listen to our episode on P.T.

Barnum?

He was an absolute monster.

Or Madame C.J.

Walker.

She wasn't a monster.

And remember, if you've enjoyed the podcast, please share the show with your friends.

Subscribe to Your Dead to Me on BBC Sounds to get the episodes 28 days earlier than on any other platform.

And switch on your your notifications so you never miss an episode.

I just want to say a huge thank you to our guests.

In History Corner, we have the fantastic Dr.

Vanessa Hege from the University of Birmingham.

Thank you, Vanessa.

Thank you for having me back.

It was a pleasure.

And in Comedy Corner, what a debut.

We had the exceptional Ed Byrne.

Thank you, Ed.

I have to retire undefeated.

I'd love to come back, but I can't guarantee I'll get to 10, so I'd have to just decline any future offers.

One and done.

Perfect score.

And to you, lovely listener, join me next time as we rummage through the pantry of history for another delicious box of facts.

But for for now, I'm off to go and squirt yogurt up my bum and sue my brother for control of the family name.

Bye!

You're dead to me to BBC Studios Audio Production for BBC Radio 4.

Hello, I'm Brian Cox.

I'm Robin Inks, and we're back for a new series of the Infinite Monkey Cage.

We have our 201st extravaganza, where we're going to talk about how animals emote when around trains and tunnels or something like that.

I'm not entirely sure.

Doing one on potatoes.

Of course, we're doing one on potatoes.

You love potatoes.

I know, but yeah, you love chips.

I'll only enjoy it if it's got curry sauce on it.

We've always got techno-fossils, moths versus butterflies, and a history of light.

That'll do, won't it?

Listen first on BBC Sounds.

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