Actually, Kellog gave up and shut down the machines from tyring to compete with Post. The next day he “Discovered” Corn flakes.
Now that may just be the perfect way to balance the too-much-sweetness of Frosted Flakes with the too-much-blandness of corn flakes. Too bad horchata’s not in general availability…
Cold breakfast cereal was invented by several health food advocates back in the late 1800s. These fellows (named Kellogg and Post) ran vegetarian sanitariums and came up with breakfast cereal as a high-fiber alternative to the then-popular breakfast of meat and some more meat. Milk was an allowable product at these sanitariums, and it is my WAG (I couldn’t find an absolute cite for this) that because milk or cream was commonly eaten with porridges, it was an obvious choice to moisten the flakes and nuggets given to the sanitarium guests for breakfast. This also added a protein to the vegetarian diet they were eating. The cereal was popular among sanitarium guests and was soon introduced to the public. So far as I can tell (looking at pictures of old boxes, old ads in magazines, etc.) cereal was always marketed to be eaten with milk. They were marketing the stuff to mothers, remember, and moms of the day would have considered milk a very healthy food. And once we moved on from Corn Flakes to Cap’n Crunch, the habit of pouring milk on cereal was set.
The really funny thing is that that was the only time I can remember us ever having any horchata in the house. I think my brother needed it for one of his Spanish classes for some reason and some of it wound up coming home.
That’s not the way I’ve heard the story in various places. The discovery was fortuitous, but not because Kellogg “gave up”. And IIRC Post wasn’t even in the running at the time.
[quote=Rufus Xavier]
I once ate Buc Wheats cereal with beer instead of milk. It was good, actually.I poured hot coffee on HiLo’s one winter morning. It wasn’t as bad as I anticipated: sort of a lo-carb, hi-protein, caffeinated slurry that warmed the tummy. Wouldn’t do it again, though.
Now, don’t knock it 'till you’ve tried it, but - vodka.
Water on Cheerios and butter on Pop Tarts are two ideas that never occured to me until I read about them here.
Gotta love the SDMB (although I don’t think I’ll be trying the Cheerios thing).