Ingenious cookers, heavy steel rollers, running at differential speeds, and the inherent virtues of the small grains did the job for Battle Creek though some observers of the burgeoning Michigan metropolis have said enviously that it was done with mirrors. Although the peoples of all nations have ever remained stubbornly nationalistic in their food preferences, the American “health foods” proved to be the exception to the rule. Within less than a generation, the crackling foodstuffs invented in this small Midwestern city were munched daily in most of the world's countries, colonies and dependencies. Yet two other countries were soon eating more corn flakes per head than the U.S. The breakfast that required no cooking, that would keep indefinitely, that poured crisply out of a cardboard box, was as American as beans or baseball. Impressing daily upon the mothers and small fry of the world the health message of the Cereal City, which marketed food and philosophy together.īy 1911 there were 108 brands of corn flakes alone being packed in Battle Creek. Millions of dollars’ worth advertising and billions of break fast-food cartons made the good name of Battle Creek a kitchen-and-pantry word from one coast of continental North America to the other, carried it across all oceans and seas, hypnotically repetitive, 015 4 They helped to keep down the High Cost, of Living, raised the national consumption of fluid milk, added a bright new variety to a monotonous and heavy diet. The crinkly Battle Creek foods proved to be a spectacular contribution to kitchen convenience in a servantless world. What really gilded the town, though, and gave it boulevard lights, a first-class hotel and its first multimillionaire, was the invention locally of a whole category of dry breakfast foods, precooked, ready to eat. The “crick” turned the wheels or village industries-saw and flour mills, broom factories, planning mills later joined by furniture works, agricultural-implement and steam-pump factories.
Named for a ruckus between two Indians and two surveyors, one of the world's most minuscule Indian affrays, in which no wounds worse than a broken head were inflicted, Battle Creek developed slowly around a water-power site. “Battle Crick,” she told an audience of visiting drummers, “is the best-advertised little old town in the whole United States.”ĭuring the years just before and after 1900, Battle Creek had turned away from the Arcadian life of a Main Street town and entered the industrial age with something of a bang.
Used to preside over the newsstand in the Michigan Central depot at Battle Creek, Michigan, in the early years of this century, patted up her back hair, the way women do when they feel themselves in command of the situation.
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