Nutrition advice seems to change from one moment to the next – don’t eat fat, eat fat, don’t eat carbs, eat carbs. A new exhibit at Johnson and Wales University’s Culinary Museum takes us back to a time when those messages were just beginning to enter the modern world.
It plumbs the history of the C.W. Post Company, maker of Grape Nuts cereal and others, foods its founder was convinced would put anyone on the road to wellness. Touring the C.W. Post cereal company exhibit at the Johnson and Wales University Culinary Arts Museum takes us back through food and nutrition history.
The Post cereal exhibit is on display indefinitely at the Johnson and Wales University Culinary Arts Museum in Providence.
The C.W. Post Company got its start around the turn of the last century. C.W. Post spent some time at a health farm run by his future rival, John Harvey Kellogg, in Battle Creek, Michigan. His time there inspired him to start the cereal company. Johnson and Wales University Culinary Arts Museum collections manager Erin Williams leads a tour of a new exhibit charting Post’s journey.
“He was a health food advocate who had been plagued with ulcers during his life, and had gone to stay at the Battle Creek sanitarium for about nine months. He wasn’t cured but he discovered that a grain based diet was a great way to go.”
Promoting a grain-based diet might draw the ire of paleo and Atkins diet followers everywhere these days. But this was around the year 1900. And soon after, Post introduced breakfast cereal Grape-Nuts. It was one of the first ready-to-eat, boxed cereals – and sales took off.
“This was a revolutionary new product in a way, right?” I ask. “Maybe for mothers, women. Pour into a bowl with some milk and breakfast is served!”
“Yes, it no longer requires the stove,” says Williams. “We’re talking about, this is happening at a time when we’re just moving away from those cast iron stoves, preparing your breakfast the night before or early in the morning. This was straight off the shelf.”
To promote its products and their health benefits, Post created its own education department. It produced a series of lush, Edwardian-era illustrations of Post’s factories and workers, on display in the exhibit.
In one, a happy, healthy family skips down a country road. In the next, Post company workers mix and dry the grains. The posters toured schools, on a kind of Post cereal road show.
“It’s almost like, this is safe, this is a good product, you should feel comfortable going to the store and buying this product,” says collections manager Erin Williams. “And oh, by the way, this is what this product looks like.”
In an age when prepared foods were still new for some households, the pictures told a story they could relate to. Of course, at its heart, these posters were pure marketing.
And since then, cereals have been a staple of American breakfasts. Until recently, when the nutritional pendulum seems to have swung wildly away from carbohydrates and back again. Was Post on to something, or did he set Americans on a dangerous path to obesity? I asked Johnson and Wales dietician and culinary instructor Chef Todd Seyfarth.
“Where I start to get apprehensive about messages around carbohydrates is that usually I’m much more concerned with sugar sweetened beverages than I am about grains. Especially whole grains.”
Seyfarth says claims that cave people didn’t eat grains, or that all carbs are bad, have been debunked. Carbohydrates are essential for the body’s functioning. He says we now believe it’s probably all the sugar – which is also a carbohydrate, but one that’s more easily converted to fat – we’ve added to those grains that’s the problem.
I certainly remember sprinkling sugar on my Grape-Nuts as a kid. Oops.
Of course today, there’s no need to sprinkle sugar on your cereal. Plenty of them come loaded up with the stuff. And Seyfarth says that’s the real takeaway from this exhibit about Post. That over time, cereal makers have marketed their products to kids and added more and more sugar.
“The toys and prizes that came with it, mascots and all that kinds of stuff and the way you get a child to ask their parent for a particular cereal is make it sweet. Add sugar.”
From its roots as a wholesome cereal company, Post branched out into hot dogs, Jell-O and other kid favorites. But you can still buy Grape-Nuts, just like your grandmother did.
