In my childhood home, we only had cooked breakfast on Sundays. The rest of the week was relegated to cereal, which we kids were allowed to choose for ourselves. I think my sisters stuck to one brand, but I was a cereal adventurer and could easily be won over by a toy in the box or a particularly memorable television commercial.
On Sundays we would usually have the same thing — overcooked link sausage, fried eggs, and a Bisquick coffee cake made from a recipe in the Girl Scout Cookbook. Occasionally my mother would make pancakes, also from the miracle Bisquick box. Click on any image for a larger version.
Breakfast can be one of the best or one of the most abused meals of the day. We must crave sweets when we wake up, as many breakfast items are high in sugar, whether in the cereal or the syrup.
Supposedly the term “breakfast” comes from the combination of the word break and fast, as in breaking the fast from the night before. Sounds a bit of a stretch to me, but I’ll buy it since I lack a better explanation.
Of course people have always eaten something first thing in the morning — it’s pretty natural to wake up somewhat hungry. But it wasn’t until the last quarter of the nineteenth century that specialized breakfast cereals began appearing.
Breakfast cereal was first presented as a vegetarian alternative to other breakfast items and many breakfast cereals had their start as health foods made at sanitariums.
It was at a sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan, where John Harvey Kellogg began trying to fix the digestive problems of his patients. He accidentally discovered the breakfast “flake” when he left out ground-up wheat overnight and it dried. His first cereal product, invented in 1877, was named “granola.”
By 1930 when the first “puffed” cereals arrived (Kix), a number of companies were making packaged breakfast products. Companies began sweetening these products so they would appeal to children.
Not surprisingly, sugar content kept going up and up until in 1953 Kellogg’s Sugar Smacks had 56% sugar content by weight. In my day we had Trix, Sugar Smacks, and a variety of specialty brands, such as Lucky Charms, Quisp, Quake, and Apple Jacks. Cereals seem to come and go with the times, but they usually remain fairly similar in content if not name.
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This article was last modified on May 17, 2023
This article was first published on October 22, 2010
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