Book ID: CBB614658370

The Kelloggs: Battling Brothers of Battle Creek (2017)

unapi

Markel, Howard (Author)


Pantheon Books


Publication Date: 2017
Physical Details: xxix + 506
Language: English

John Harvey Kellogg was one of America's most beloved physicians; a best-selling author, lecturer, and health-magazine publisher; founder of the Battle Creek Sanitarium; and patron saint of the pursuit of wellness. His youngest brother, Will, was the founder of the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company, which revolutionized the mass production of food and what we eat for breakfast. In The Kelloggs, Howard Markel tells the sweeping saga of these two extraordinary men, whose lifelong competition and enmity toward one another changed America's notion of health and wellness from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, and who helped change the course of American medicine, nutrition, wellness, and diet. The Kelloggs were of Puritan stock, a family that came to the shores of New England in the mid-seventeenth century, went west to the wooded Michigan frontier to start a farm that became one of the biggest in the county, and then renounced it all for the religious calling of Ellen Harmon White, a self-proclaimed prophetess, and James White, whose new Seventh-day Adventist theology was based on Christian principles and sound body, mind, and hygiene rules--Ellen called it "health reform." The Whites groomed the young John Kellogg for a central role in the Seventh-day Adventist Church and sent him to America's finest medical school, Bellevue Hospital Medical College. Kellogg's main medical focus--and America's number one malady: indigestion. Markel gives us the life and times of the Kellogg brothers of Battle Creek: Dr. John Harvey Kellogg and his world-famous Battle Creek Sanitarium medical center, spa, and grand hotel attracted thousands actively pursuing health and well-being. Among the guests: Mary Todd Lincoln, Amelia Earhart, Booker T. Washington, Johnny Weissmuller, Dale Carnegie, Sojourner Truth, Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and George Bernard Shaw. And the presidents he advised: Taft, Harding, Hoover, and Roosevelt, with first lady Eleanor. The brothers Kellogg experimented on malt, wheat, and corn meal, and, tinkering with special ovens and toasting devices, came up with a ready-to-eat, easily digested cereal they called Corn Flakes. As Markel chronicles the Kelloggs' fascinating, Magnificent Ambersons-like ascent into the pantheon of American industrialists, we see the vast changes in American social mores that took shape in diet, health, medicine, philanthropy, and food manufacturing during seven decades--changing the lives of millions and helping to shape our industrial age. (Publisher)

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Reviewed By

Review Michael S. Kideckel (Autumn 2018) Review of "The Kelloggs: Battling Brothers of Battle Creek". Business History Review (pp. 580-582). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB614658370/

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Authors & Contributors
Dechêne, Louise
Peter Tip
Haedicke, Michael A.
John Hoenig
Haushofer, Lisa
Bryce Evans
Concepts
Food industry and trade
Food and foods
Agriculture
Public health
Business history
Grain crops; Cereals; Grasses
Time Periods
20th century
19th century
21st century
18th century
20th century, late
20th century, early
Places
United States
Latin America
Europe
Canada
California (U.S.)
Mexico
Institutions
Pan American World Airways
Pullman Palace Car Company
United States. Department of Agriculture
United States. Food and Drug Administration (USFDA)
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