Bowled over: Cereal is not just for breakfast anymore

Cold cereal is hot right now, according to "The Breakfast Cereal Gourmet," (Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2005).

Author David Hoffman's cookbook is full of cereal advertising trivia and vintage photos. Sprinkled throughout the book are recipes, such as Lucky Charmed Utah Lamb, by Utah chef Dave Jones, and Cap'n Crunch Crab Cakes from Planet Hollywood.

Whether you consider it the breakfast of champions or junk food, breakfast cereal is a top seller. After milk and soda, it's the most frequent item found in American grocery carts, Hoffman says. One out of every two Americans starts the morning with a bowl of cereal.

In the past few years, "cereal bars" have sprung up, with menus consisting of cereals, toppings and milk.

In Utah, The Cereal Cafe in Sugar House is open for breakfast and lunch. The Cereality restaurant chain has gone national — leaving some folks wondering why. Part of a restaurant's appeal is avoiding the labor of chopping up fresh veggies for a salad bar or deep-frying potatoes for a fast-food restaurant. But how hard is it to pour dry cereal out of a box?

Cereal is comfort food — a nostalgic reminder of Saturday mornings watching cartoons on TV. And long before text messaging, poor spellers could blame it on the cereal boxes read while eating breakfast — words like "Trix," "Froot" and "Krispies."

Today the cereal industry uses more than 800 million pounds of sugar per year and spends the second-highest amount of money on TV ads (the top spenders are automobile makers), according to Hoffman. Yet cereal originally started out as a health food, according to the company histories of several major cereal makers.

Pilgrim women often served popped corn with milk and sugar, which predates pre-dates the folks at Kellogg, Post and General Mills. But in the 1800s, many Americans still ate the traditional English breakfast of eggs, bacon, sausage or beef, with very little fiber. This diet resulted in various digestive problems.

Dr. John Harvey Kellogg and his brother, William Kellogg, experimented with various grain dishes while running a health sanitarium in Battle Creek, Mich. William Kellogg formed The Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Co. (forerunner to Kellogg's).

C.W. Post came to the Battle Creek sanitarium to cure his upset stomach. He later created Postum, a cereal-based coffee substitute. In 1897 he came up with Grape-Nuts, and in 1904, Elijah's Manna (renamed Post Toasties). Meanwhile, around 1893, Henry Perky of Denver began making wheat cakes called Shredded Wheat for digestive problems.