Adventists and Corn Flakes and Vegans – Oh My!
One of biggest influences on modern-day vegetarianism in the United States has been the Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) Church, founded in the 1840s by vegetarian health reformer Ellen White. She believed that the proper diet for humans was prescribed by God in the Bible, and wrote in 1864 that Adam and Eve were given all they needed for nourishment – "He designed that the race should eat. It was contrary to His plan to have the life of any creature taken. There was to be no death in Eden. The fruit of the trees in the garden was the food man’s wants required." The SDA church focuses heavily on spiritual health, diet and exercise – in fact, several studies have found that Adventists are significantly healthier than the general population! Today, almost all of the church’s clergy and roughly half of its two million members worldwide are lacto-ovo vegetarians, and the SDA church owns its own publishing company, plus a number of hospitals, natural food stores, and vegetarian restaurants. Church-affiliated universities are leaders in scientific research into dietetics, and continue to promote vegetarianism with a strong emphasis on health.
One man who worked as a printer for White, helping to publish the Adventists’ health journal, was a fellow named John Harvey Kellogg. White and her husband, James, took a liking to Kellogg and paid for his medical school education, then placed him in charge of their Battle Creek Sanitarium, a spa retreat for "health restoration and training." A believer in the value of preventative medicine, Dr. Kellogg’s treatments were founded in the Adventist philosophy with an emphasis on fresh air, sunshine, exercise, rest and diet. The diet he prescribed, which he called "biologic living," forbade meats, condiments, spices, alcohol, chocolate, coffee and tea, but he worked tirelessly to create a vegetarian diet that was also varied and tasty – over the course of his career, Dr. Kellogg invented over 80 different products using nuts and grains, including peanut butter, a cereal-based coffee substitute (an early version of Postum) and corn flakes.
Dr. Kellogg was convinced that a great many illnesses were caused by toxic bacteria in the bowels and favored a high-fiber vegetarian diet, blaming some 90 percent of all disease on stomach and bowel problems. He was especially concerned about the effects of meat-eating on the intestinal tract. In many ways, Dr, Kellogg’s practices can be viewed as somewhat different – he disapproved of sexual activity of all kinds, gave patients multiple daily enemas, and shocked them in electrified tanks of water – but his influence as an advocate of vegetarianism was profound. Among the visitors to his sanitarium were automobile tycoon Henry Ford, retailers J.C. Penney and S.S.Kresge, actress Sarah Berhardt, explorer Richard Byrd, inventor Thomas Edison, industrialist Harvey Firestone, President William Howard Taft, and aviator Amelia Earhart. Once he started marketing his food products, Dr. Kellogg had to hire his brother to take over because the enterprise was so successful, and his method of mass-producing cereal for the marketplace was copied by numerous competitors
Battle Creek Sanitarium was just one of many vegetarian health retreats in the United States, and advocates of the lifestyle – and shrewd businessmen hoping to capitalize on a trend – opened vegetarian restaurants in large cities across the country. Toward the end of the century, however, interest in vegetarianism waned. In the early part of the 20th century, the United States Department pf Agriculture (USDA) began producing food guides, ostensibly to help struggling families plan nutritious meals during times of little money and, later, food rationing. These food guides, unsurprisingly, recommended that Americans eat hefty amounts of meat, eggs and dairy – all products of the food industries overseen by the Department of Agriculture.
