This extensively-researched popular history chronicles how Battle Creek, Michigan, became both a health center and the place where America’s breakfast cereal industry developed at the turn of the century. Carson tells how Battle Creek first hosted a famous sanitarium run by Dr. John Harvey Kellogg (1852-1943), under the initial sponsorship of the Seventh-Day Adventists, and featuring water cures, vegetarianism, exercise, and sexual abstinence. Kellogg, raised in an Adventist family, later parted company with that denomination over religious differences. His sanitarium encouraged other experimental medical enterprises, transforming Battle Creek into a place where entrepreneurs began to produce “healthy” foods such as crackers, coffee substitutes, and, especially, cereals. Charles W. Post, a disgruntled former Kellogg patient who practiced briefly as a healer himself, achieved early success manufacturing and marketing these new products. By standardizing sizes and recipes for such foods as Grape Nuts and Postum, and combining mass distribution methods with aggressive advertising techniques, Post achieved spectacular success with consumers and paved the way for a host of competitors.
– Library of Congress American Memory website