Go far enough down a rabbit hole, and you’ll find more than Wonderland. No subject or history happens in a vacuum and, if you are curious enough, you’ll find links to people, moments, movements, and concepts you might not have thought possible.

I’m reading an oddly engaging book that is, ostensibly, about a famous sibling rivalry in Battle Creek, Michigan at the dawn of the 20th century. The book is also about American foodways of the time, the history of medicine, and the beliefs of various Christian sects in America- namely the Millerites, the Grahamites, and the Seventh-Day Adventists.

You might think that’s a little far afield for a book on sibling rivalry- until you realize that the brothers in question were Dr. John Harvey and Will Kellogg. Together, they created the “wellness” industry, pioneered the mass production of food… and so helped give 21st-century weirdos something else to obsess over.

Dr. John Kellogg was the “Dr. Oz” of his time and pioneered what we might call the “wellness” industry in America, espousing lifestyle changes to prevent maledictions. His sanitarium in Battle Creek was ahead of its time in some ways and ridiculously of its time in others. While the Good Doctor was spouting cures, writing, and giving demonstrations, his quiet little brother William headed the company making their health food line, pioneering mass-produced food in the country- and making The Kellogg Company a household name to this day.

Deeply influenced by his Seventh-Day Adventist Christian faith and a personal connection with its founders (which similarly led to Dr. Kellogg’s mentorship of William Sadler, which would lead to his leadership of a eugenicist alien cult WHICH ITSELF leads to Celestial Seasonings tea. Like I said, rabbit holes…) Kellogg and the Adventists advocated a diet and lifestyle that they believed would keep one physically- and therefore mentally and spiritually- pure to receive God’s approval. It included daily exercise, abstaining from tobacco, caffeine and alcohol, a vegetarian diet avoiding fatty or fried foods, and drinking plenty of water.

We can all now giggle at the idea that versions of this diet were also meant to dissuade people from “Self-Pollution,” (a.k.a jerking the gherkin, waxing the missile, choking the chicken, rubbing/knuckling one out… you get it) but the fact is a lot of it DOES echo sentiments of nutritionists and physicians today. While the homeopathic and folk remedies they encouraged can’t be said to have been very effective, they certainly did less harm than much of the “medicine” of the time.

This isn’t a book report or a piece on the Kellogg brothers, but it does highlight a vital point about food and foodways that frequently gets ignored or, arguably worse, glamorized and oversimplified for consumption. That is that food and foodways are part of culture, influence every part of it, AND can shift and change.

I said before and still believe that learning to cook is one of the best tangential learning opportunities available. Learn enough about food and cooking and you can’t help but become familiar with STEM fields, History, Anthropology, Geology, Climatology, Sociology, Psychology, and any number of other fields and skill sets in demand today. Key crops feature not just on the plates of Indigenous cultures but wind their way into their folklore, language, and symbology. The difficulties brought by crop failures, famines, and loss of game animals echo in their histories, generational traumas, and changes to their diet that may remain long after crops have recovered or game returned.

A living culture is exactly that. Living. Evolution and change happen in living things regularly.

While I love digging into old cookbooks and learning about classic cooking and baking methods, this is rarely because I think it’s somehow a “better way to live.” While I love the ingenuity of different preparations, cooking techniques, and technology of the time, the diet of Americans at the turn of the century was an absolute nightmare. Fats, starches, sugars, red meat, little vegetables, heavy meals, and heavier drinking. It came with everything we now know diets and lifestyles like that entail- gout, diabetes (that was still decades from becoming a treatable condition,) heart and liver diseases, “dyspepsia”- the catch-all term for digestive conditions from flatulence and diarrhea to upset stomach or heartburn, and pellagra among the poor.

What’s more, food purity and safety laws were practically nonexistent. We can wax poetic about having had a neighborhood milkman, but the fact that milk would often be mixed with formaldehyde somehow gets left out of the scene- like sifting your flour for bits of bone, ash, or plaster. This weird and gross history is left to us in the form of recipe instructions, or even recipes that won’t work the same they worked with/around adulterations we don’t even consider today. If you wonder with the British seem to boil everything to death, or why your grandparents insisted on eating their meat well done, it was a habit based on health and safety concerns.

It’s always good to know where your food comes from. It’s good to know your farmers and ranchers, source your food as consciously as financially possible, and eat a balanced diet- but basing your diet, or your lifestyle, on some romanticized vision of the past is bound to cause problems. The past was left there for a reason, and believe me, the good stuff from it is still there. You can dig into the recipes and foodways of your own culture- whatever those look like now- and make educated decisions about what you want to resurrect, or if you even need to.

Personally, I love finding a dish from my own Ashkenazi Jewish-American culture or someone else’s and learning the twists and turns that brought it there. We have no need to be purists about it (except in the case of bagels…) because cultures bump up and influence each other just like people do, and people change as technology and science. Just because Jewish Deli sandwiches came to be huge due to lack of refrigeration doesn’t mean, first, I have to eat all my sandwiches with a solid pound of corned beef on them. Second, it definitely doesn’t mean life was somehow better before household refrigerators and that I’ve become too “Americanized.”

“So what, we should just accept that someday we’ll all just eat Soylent Green and vitamin pills?”
No, my silly little culture warrior. If that’s not what we want, if it’s not what we buy, if we keep it part of our culture and take the steps to make sure the good stuff stays around, then no. Your piehole will remain pill-free… but it’s hard to have good healthy chickens like Grandmaw used to raise on the Sunday table when theres no safe clean ground on which to raise them.

If we want to eat well, some answers may lie in the past regarding farming practices and land stewardship- but we’ll need to answer them in the future.

Stay Classy,