Brains wear out

September is officially "Better Breakfast Month" and Grape Nuts is definitely off the Paleo diet.  It was initially marketed as a natural cereal that could enhance vitality and as a "brain food."

Grape Nuts was developed in 1897 by C.W. Post, a former patient an later competitor of the breakfast food inventor and quack Dr. John Kellogg. In the 1960s, Grape-Nuts was the cereal that "fills you up, not out."  Remember Andy Griffith and those mother/daughter look-a-likes?

So what is a Grape Nut? Soaked in milk, it is a mildly sweet, mushy "brown stuff." All the world's Grape Nuts are made in a six-story concrete building in the San Joaquin Valley. The valley grows lots of grapes and nuts, but Grape Nuts doesn't contain any local ingredients. Barley and wheat flour is mixed with yeast (one cup per 2,000 pounds) and water. It turns to dough, gets chopped into 10-pound loaves and sent into a huge oven -- 1,610 loaves at a time. The loaves emerge from the oven and catapult into a fan -- a whirling high-speed shredder that rips them to shreds. Bread crumbs.

 

1900 Grape Nut advertisement