March 7 is National Cereal Day. This holiday celebrates America’s most popular breakfast food. On average, every American eats more than 160 bowls of cereal each year!
People haven’t always munched on cold cereal in the morning. The food got its start in the mid-1800s. At that time, people were leaving jobs on farms to work in factories and offices. They needed something cheap and easy to eat for breakfast before going to work.
James Caleb Jackson came up with the first cereal in New York in 1863. The breakfast food, which he called granula, consisted of baked, dried dough. But granula was so tough that it had to be soaked in milk overnight to be eaten the next morning. Many workers found this inconvenient. Granula didn’t take off.
But others had better cereal ideas. A businessman named Charles William Post developed Grape-Nuts in 1897. Two brothers by the last name of Kellogg developed cornflakes in 1898.
“Cereal really took off [after that],” explains food historian Adam Shprintzen. In the 1950s, companies introduced sweetened cereals like Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes. “But original Corn Flakes are still one of the most popular cereals in the United States,” says Shprintzen.