On this day in vegan history · April 14, 1896
The Patent for Flaked Cereal
A batch of wheat dough left out overnight by a Seventh-day Adventist doctor became the founding patent of the cereal aisle, and it started life as medicine, not a snack.
The facts
- Patent number
- 558,393, "Flaked Cereals and Process of Preparing Same"
- Filed / issued
- Filed May 31, 1895; issued April 14, 1896
- Named inventor
- John Harvey Kellogg, superintendent of the Battle Creek Sanitarium
- Scope
- Covered flaking multiple grains, not wheat alone
On April 14, 1896, the U.S. Patent Office issued No. 558,393, "Flaked Cereals and Process of Preparing Same," to John Harvey Kellogg, the physician who ran the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan. Kellogg was a committed vegetarian and Seventh-day Adventist who treated the Sanitarium's patients with a strict meat-free, low-stimulant diet, and the flake was born out of that regimen rather than any ambition to sell breakfast. The story, as it's usually told, is that Kellogg left a batch of wheat-berry dough sitting out overnight, ran it through the rollers anyway the next morning instead of discarding it, and got flakes instead of the sheets he expected. His brother Will Keith Kellogg, the Sanitarium's business manager, was the one who turned the accident into a repeatable process, though only John Harvey's name went on the patent. The dispute over credit between the brothers would outlast both of them.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
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It is generally agreed that upon being called out one night, John Kellogg left a batch of wheat-berry dough behind. Rather than throwing it out the next morning, he sent it through the rollers and was surprised to obtain delicate flakes, which could then be baked.
Wikipedia, "Corn flakes"
Source: Wikipedia -
A patent for "Flaked Cereals and Process of Preparing Same" was filed on May 31, 1895, and issued on April 14, 1896, to John Harvey Kellogg as Patent No. 558,393.
Wikipedia, "Corn flakes"
Source: Wikipedia
Why it still matters
Breakfast cereal is one of the vegan movement's oldest quiet victories: a meat-free, plant-based food that became a fixture of the American table not through activism but through a health reformer's kitchen accident, decades before anyone used the word vegan.
Sources
This history is still being written.
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