Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us (13 page)

“No company has done more to revolutionize U.S. cooking than General Foods Corp., the world’s biggest food processor,” the piece continued. “It sparked the revolution with its line of Birds Eye frozen foods, still the biggest-selling brand. Last year it put its 250 products (including different flavors and varieties) into 4.5 billion packages that the housewife took home for $1.1 billion. On pantry shelves and in refrigerators from Maine to Florida, its products are household words—Jell-O, Maxwell House coffee, Post cereals, Swans Down cake mix, Sanka, Minute Rice, Gaines dog food, etc.”

In one final blow to the traditional teachings of home economics, Mortimer was quoted reading the long, arduous instructions in
Fannie Farmer’s Cookbook
for preparing a fresh fish, which trudged along from cleaning to scaling to boning. “And so on,” Mortimer said, “through all the other gruesome procedures before the housewife could start to burn her fingers in the hot grease or fill her kitchen with clouds of fish-laden smoke.”

“What does it say on a package of frozen fish sticks?” he said, triumphantly. “ ‘Heat and serve.’ ”

Betty Dickson is diplomatic about the turn that home economics took in the 1960s and 1970s, when cooking from scratch increasingly gave way to the kind of quick fare celebrated by
Time
.
“We taught skills, but over the years that changed. It became more consumer education,” she said. “I’m so thankful that jobs became more available, and people had more resources. But that wasn’t always for the best. The change came in how they used their resources. The boys in high school had to have a car, and they had to get a job to get the car.”

Charles Mortimer died in 1978, and he is buried on the horse farm he owned in New Jersey, which one of his grandsons has turned into a winery. His legacy is left for Al Clausi to defend, and he had a bit of a struggle with it when we spoke. Today, he told me, the most remarkable aspect of Mortimer’s convenience doctrine is not the speed with which pudding can be made, or how a few spoonfuls of sugar powder can avoid the hassle of
squeezing oranges, or even how multi-course dinners can be pulled out of the freezer and refrigerator, already prepped by “factory maids.” The most remarkable aspect of the doctrine, he said, is how it is now being challenged by newer generations of consumers—the sons and daughters and grandchildren of the people he and other food technicians had wooed with the quick-to-cook packaged foods.

“Convenience is still very high in the consumer’s mind,” Clausi said. “But it is not what it used to be. Now there are more questions being asked. How is it convenient? What are the ingredients? What am I trading for the convenience?”

Clausi still works as a consultant to the food industry, and he had to chuckle to himself recently when one of General Foods’ old rivals called on him for some advice. It was Kellogg, the cereal maker, looking for ways to boost sales. Keeping in mind the doubts that consumers were starting to have about convenience, Clausi told Kellogg to think about something other than sugar to draw their interest. “Why can’t you make breakfast cereal from a protein source like nuts?” he told them. “They have a good nutrition profile.”

This was the same company, however, that had relied heavily on sugar in trouncing General Foods back in the early 1950s and in maintaining its lead over other cereal makers ever since.
Kellogg had gone so far down the road with sugar, in fact, that there was no easy way to turn back. If consumers were getting antsy about the health implications of sugar, getting rid of it was not a viable way out for Kellogg. The biggest cereal maker in the world would have to find another way to keep drawing its customers in, and it would find that that way was in the hands of a section of the processed food industry that was gaining in stature every day: marketing.

J
ohn Harvey Kellogg had one thing in mind when he created his sprawling health complex on the prairie of Michigan in the late 1800s. He wanted to cure people of what one observer had called “Americanitis”—or the bloated, gaseous stomachache caused by the ailment otherwise known as dyspepsia. The whole country seemed to be suffering from it, thanks in large part to what they were eating for breakfast. Nineteenth-century Americans typically started their mornings with sausages, beefsteaks, bacon, and fried ham, to which, as the day progressed, they added salt pork and whiskey. Grease, in effect, had become the national condiment.

As a medical student at New York City’s Bellevue Hospital Medical College,
John Harvey Kellogg had seen, up close, what this diet was doing to America’s health. Concerned by the profusion of indigestion he saw, he ended up beating a hasty retreat to his home state of Michigan, where he decided that what America needed—as much as another doctor—was someone to promote better nutrition.

Kellogg took over a tiny health facility in Battle Creek, a town on the prairie 120 miles west of Detroit, and renamed it the Battle Creek Sanitarium. He added a solarium, a gymnasium, and a glassed-in palm garden with rubber trees. As word of the facility’s salutary treatments got around, the rooms began filling up. In high season, four hundred guests were tended to by a staff of one thousand, and they happily underwent a relentless regime of baths, enemas, and exercise that included a high-stepping workout to a song that was dubbed “The Battle Creek Sanitarium March.” Mostly, though, Kellogg sought to remake their eating habits with a strict dietary regimen. He served wheat gluten mush, oatmeal crackers, graham rolls, and a tea made from a South African grass. He disdained salt and abhorred sugar, citing the overconsumption of both as primary contributors to the nation’s health woes, so there was none of either to be found in the sanitarium food. Nor was there much fat; his reform diet was built around whole grains and a dearth of meat.

On a trip to Denver in 1894, Kellogg met a dyspeptic entrepreneur who had invented a cereal made from shredded wheat. Enamored by the idea, Kellogg set out to make his own breakfast version of it. He returned to Battle Creek and, with help from his wife, took some leftover boiled wheat, ran it through a machine that turned the mush into thin sheets of dough, and popped them into the oven. Out came a flaked cereal, which Kellogg served to his guests and which his guests liked. Kind of. The texture was certainly novel.

That might have been the extent of his cereal’s market—the captive sanitarium guests—except for a bit of treachery in the Kellogg household. John Harvey Kellogg had
a younger brother named Will who worked as the sanitarium’s bookkeeper. Will was far more interested in making money than his older brother, who was forever going off on some scientific lark just when the sanitarium most needed sound management. So Will took over the cereal operation, commandeering a barn out back to make the dough and bake the flakes. The Kellogg brothers called their cereal venture the Sanitas Nut Food Company, and with Will’s attention to detail it did reasonably well, considering its unsweetened taste: They sold 113,400
pounds of the stuff in 1896, mostly to their own patients and Battle Creek locals. With his brother’s encouragement, Will also began experimenting with flakes of corn, called cerealine, which were used by the brewing industry. They named these the Sanitas Toasted Corn Flakes.

Then came the betrayal.

In 1906, John Harvey was in Europe on a medical-science trip when Will went out and bought some sugar, which he added to the corn flake mix. These, the sanitarium patients
really
liked. When John Harvey returned, he was furious. So Will struck out on his own. Within months of leaving, he was churning out 2,900 cases a day of the cereal he called “Kellogg’s Toasted Corn Flakes.” The brothers ended up in court twice, fighting for the commercial rights to the family name. Will prevailed. On December 11, 1922, Will registered his company under a new name: Kellogg.

Thus, the sweetened breakfast was born, as was a core industry strategy that food processors would deploy forevermore. Whenever health concerns arose over one of their pillar ingredients—salt, sugar, or fat—the solution of choice for the food manufacturers was the simplest: Just swap out the problem component for another that wasn’t, at the moment, as high on the list of concerns. In this case, the fat-laden breakfast plate of the nineteenth century, vilified for upsetting the national stomach, was largely replaced by the sugary cereal bowl of the twentieth century, and with it came a new set of health issues that would be slow to arouse widespread public concern.

Will Kellogg should not get
all
the credit, or blame, for sweetening cereal, however. One of the sanitarium’s earliest guests was
a marketing whiz named C. W. Post, who took the baths, ate the meals, and, inspired by what he experienced there, eventually went into business for himself. In 1892, he started a rival health spa on the east side of Battle Creek and began turning out a stream of health-conscious items: a coffee substitute called Postum; a cereal he called Grape-Nuts—“grape” for the maltose sugar he used, which he called “grape-sugar,” and “nuts” for the flavor—and a sweetened corn flake cereal he called Post Toasties.

Post’s cereals, however, weren’t his most lasting contribution to the industry. Rather, it was his knack for marketing. In some of the first-ever advertising campaigns in America, Post sold his Postum by disparaging coffee as a “drug drink” that contained “poisonous” caffeine. He sold his first cereal with the slogan “Brains are built by Grape-Nuts.” And he sold Toasties by putting an image of the prophet Elijah on the green-and-white box, an unapologetic attempt to tap into the spiritual movement sweeping America at the turn of the century. By 1897, Post was spending a million dollars a year on advertising and clearing a million dollars a year in profits.
^*

Will Kellogg took to marketing, too, and as he and Post began racking up their fortunes, Battle Creek turned into a cereal boom town. Entrepreneurs swarmed in from around the country to set up factories, some of which amounted to little more than an oven shoved into a tent. Soon, there were Grape Sugar Flakes, Malt-Too, and Malted Oats; Korn-Kinks, None-Such, and Luck Boy Corn Flakes. By 1911, Battle Creek was home to 108 brands of cereal, but Kellogg and Post would emerge as the dominant players. They were eventually joined by a third manufacturer, General Mills, which began making cereal at the colossal flour mills it had on the great falls of the Mississippi River in Minneapolis.

The Big Three, as they came to be known, further solidified their hold on the cereal market in the late 1940s when Post, now owned by General Foods, became the first brand to make its cereal even sweeter by adding a candy coating. In 1949, they introduced a wheat-based product called Sugar Crisp, which caused an immediate sensation. Kellogg and General Mills, of course, then answered with their own concoctions: Sugar Corn Pops, Sugar Frosted Flakes, Sugar Smacks, Sugar Smiles, and Sugar Jets. The companies had in-house dieticians who raised concerns about the health implications of all this added sugar, but as the authors Scott Bruce
and Bill Crawford recount in their cereal industry chronicle,
Cerealizing America
, this voice of caution was quickly silenced. Jim Fish, a General Mills vice president for advertising at the time, told them, “It was overcome by marketing people who said, ‘We’ve got to be able to move into this area to survive!’ ”

By 1970, the Big Three controlled 85 percent of the cereal market. This put them in an enviable position as the decade got under way and the world’s appetite changed: The public’s enthusiasm for cereal was growing by leaps and bounds, thanks to a dramatic rip in America’s social fabric. Within a decade, 51 percent of women would be working outside the home, and when food manufacturers drilled into this data more deeply, they found even more promising news: The figure rose to 66 percent for women from twenty-five to forty-four. These women—many of whom had young children—had more money than time. Dinner was a struggle, of course, but breakfast was also a source of stress, a mad dash in which mothers tried to get everyone fed before the whole family flung itself out the front door. Convenience was key to starting the day. For the Big Three, this meant an opportunity to control the breakfast table like never before, but their power—in matters of sugar as well as money—had to be finessed.

W
ith cereal sales surging—from $660 million in 1970 to $4.4 billion by the mid-1980s—the first trouble the Big Three faced came from the fair trade watchdogs in Washington. Kellogg, Post, and General Mills had crammed the grocery shelves with so many of their own brands that there was no room for any significant competition. In fact,
they so completely controlled the cereal aisle that the Federal Trade Commission brought a complaint against the Big Three in 1976, accusing them of creating a shared monopoly in order to jack up cereal prices. Without even having a written agreement, the commission said, they were charging twenty to thirty cents more for each box of cereal than they would have been able to command had other companies been given space on the shelf to compete.
This had netted the companies $1.2 billion in consumer overcharges since 1958, and they stood to gain another $128 million each year unless the cartel was broken up. The case would not improve the FTC’s reputation as a bumbling champion of the consumer. Denying the accusation, the cereal companies mounted a vigorous defense and the antitrust action lumbered along for years, with the cereal companies outmaneuvering the FTC’s attorneys at every turn, until the commission voted in 1982 to drop its case.

On the more critical matter of what the cereal makers put
into
their boxes, there seemed to be no one in Washington willing to stand up to the Big Three. Indeed, Kellogg and its fellow manufacturers had a stalwart ally in the federal government—and, in particular, the Food and Drug Administration. The FDA was charged with overseeing the manufacture of cereal, along with all other processed foods except meat and poultry, which were controlled by the Department of Agriculture. It steadfastly refused, however, to see sugar as a threat to the public’s health. Moreover, it repeatedly declined to require food manufacturers to disclose, on their packaging, exactly how much sugar they were adding to their products. With cereals like Kaboom and Count Chocula, two General Mills brands, and Kellogg’s Sugar Frosted Flakes, the biggest seller of them all, parents could generally guess why their kids were lunging for the boxes at the breakfast table. But without specifics, sugar remained only a vague concern.