A Geography of Digestion: Biotechnology and the Kellogg Cereal Enterprise

by Nicholas Bauch

Overview

A Geography of Digestion is a highly original exploration of the legacy of the Kellogg Company, one of America’s most enduring and storied food enterprises. In the late nineteenth century, company founder John H. Kellogg was experimenting with state-of-the-art advances in nutritional and medical science at his Battle Creek Sanitarium. Believing that good health depended on digesting the right foods in the right way, Kellogg thought that proper digestion could not happen without improved technologies, including innovations in food-processing machinery, urban sewer infrastructure, and agricultural production that changed the way Americans consumed and assimilated food. Asking his readers to think about mapping the processes and locations of digestion, Nicholas Bauch moves outward from the stomach to the sanitarium and through the landscape, clarifying the relationship between food, body, and environment at a crucial moment in the emergence of American health food sensibilities.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520285798
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	10/25/2016
Series:	California Studies in Food and Culture , #62
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Nicholas Bauch is Assistant Professor of Geohumanities in the Department of Geography and Environmental Sustainability at the University of Oklahoma.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ix

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction: Spatially Extending the Digestive System 1

1 The Battle Creek Sanitarium: A Place of Health 20

2 Scientific Eating: Kellogg's Philosophy of the Modern Stomach 46

3 Flaked Cereal: The Moment of Invention 77

4 Extending the Digestive System into the Urban Landscape 102

5 The Systematization of Agriculture 124

6 Breakfast Cereal in the Twentieth Century 155

Epilogue 172

Notes 175

Bibliography 201

Index 215

Editorial Reviews

"Taking a step back to consider the bigger picture—restoring historical depth and geographic breadth to ideas about eating badly—lets us see how certain interests have converged to make salty/sugary snacks not just strategic staples for households that cannot access fresh produce, but cherished parts of the cultural iconography. Nicholas Bauch does exactly this in his fascinating A Geography of Digestion: Biotechnology and the Kellogg Cereal Enterprise."

PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review

"An imaginative contribution to food studies . . . it presents new questions for historians who are bold enough to stomach them."

Winterthur Portfolio