In the field of breakfast, the rubric of the “breakfast cereal” has become such a point of saturation that its history is never given the slightest consideration. It’s merely taken for granted that in a spectacular spread of orange juice, milk, toast, butter, eggs, and so on, the center piece will be a bowl of cereal, a ceramic or plastic half-orb filled with processed grains submerged in milk, with a perfect silver arm protruding outwards, a sort of bridge between food and mouth. It’s assumed that this is all part of some timeless tradition, dating back perhaps to antiquity. And yet, prior to the American Civil War, this dish was unheard of.

The chronicles of the breakfast cereal begin with one Dr. James Caleb Jackson, a prolific New Yorker born in 1811, who had worked as a farmer, abolitionist, journalist, and hydrotherapy pioneer. In fact, prior to his first receiving hydrotherapy, Dr. Jackson suffered poor health himself, to the detriment of his many pursuits. Thus it was not until the midpoint of the nineteenth century that his vision would become nascent. Alongside his trailblazing work in hydrotherapy was a staunch advocacy of a new vegetarian diet, which arguably may have led to the establishment of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church. The robust cornerstone of this diet was in grains. But how to get these grains from the fields and into our bodies? The answer was one of the most visionary revelations of modern invention: Granula, a cereal composed of coarse nuggets of Reverand Graham’s flour, so stout it required overnight soaking, so rich in bran it was unlike anything else in creation. Granula, invented in 1863, was the first breakfast cereal, and the forefather of modern-day Grape Nuts.