GRANOLA

For a few decades starting in the hippie era, granola was a counterculture icon—as much an emblem of rebelliousness as torn jeans and tattoos. Now consumers pay extra for jeans torn in a fashionable manner, skin art is commonplace, and granola is as unsurprising an item in supermarket baskets as Cheerios. Yes, granola is a vestige of the ’60s—but of the nineteenth century’s ’60s. It was created during the Civil War, when Dr. James Caleb Jackson, proponent of the Water Cure regimen (drink forty glasses per day) and follower of Sylvester Graham’s strict antimeat diet, decided that the patients at his Our Home on the Hillside Sanitarium in Dansville, New York, needed something more to eat than water and graham crackers. He baked thin sheets of moistened whole wheat flour, crumbled them into bits, then baked them again, creating hard little nuggets he called Granula. Followers were told to fill a glass one-third full of the stuff, top it with milk, and leave it in an icebox overnight. In the morning, the sodden Granula was to be eaten alongside a cup of Dr. Jackson’s Somo, a grain-based coffee substitute.

Jackson’s crunchy particles became the first processed health food sold in America, and the first breakfast cereal as well. Some years later, John Harvey Kellogg, who was operating a sanitarium of his own in Battle Creek, Michigan, added cornmeal and oats to the formula and began marketing his own Granula. Dr. Jackson sued him, so Kellogg changed the name of his product to Granola. By the turn of the century, there were more than forty different companies marketing similar breakfast cereals that promised good health to people who ate them.

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There is no granola more inviting than that served at the Cottage in La Jolla, California.

Breakfast cereal, originally proposed by food faddists whose programs also frequently included such radical ideas as temperance, celibacy, and women’s suffrage, was entrenched in the mainstream American diet by 1965 when long-forgotten (and trademark-expired) granola was resurrected. Its proponent was Layton Gentry, whom Time magazine called “Johnny Granola Seed” for having introduced Crunchy Granola, an all-in-one dry, portable meal perfectly suited to vagabonds, hippies living in communes, and any groovy character too stoned to cook. Writing for the Liberation News Service in 1969, Ita Jones recommended homemade granola to revolutionaries because it could be made in quantities big enough to feed a guerrilla army. She noted that it didn’t spoil and was therefore perfectly suited for sit-ins, demonstrations, and anyone “occupying buildings for a length of time.”

The Wall Street Journal ridiculed granola in a 1972 story titled “What Tastes Terrible and Doubles in Sales Every 60 Days?” in which granola was described as “something a horse might be fond of . . . about as chewy as leather—and not quite as tasty.” Nonetheless, like so many anti-establishment affectations, it soon became big business; its connotations of naturalness and health made it an irresistible product for baby boom consumers yearning to remain forever young.