The plain box of cornflakes on the bottom shelf was born inside the Battle Creek Sanitarium in 1894, where Dr. John Harvey Kellogg preached a bland, ‘unstimulating’ diet to cure the national epidemic of dyspepsia while his younger brother Will Keith Kellogg managed the books. This episode separates the internet claim that cornflakes were an anti-masturbation food from the patent and marketing record, which framed them strictly as a digestive health product.

The conversation explains the accidental discovery of tempering when a forgotten batch of wheat dough was run through rollers, the three-way credit dispute between John, his wife Ella and Will, and the broad 1895 patent filed under John’s name alone. It follows Will’s 1906 break to found the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company, his decision to add sugar, and his pioneering advertising, including the 1907 ‘wink at your grocer’ promotion, the Funny Jungleland booklet that ran for 22 years, and Cornelius the Rooster’s Welsh-language origin. It closes with the global comfort foods, from Honey Joys to funeral potatoes, that the puritanical doctor never intended.

• Why 19th-century office workers eating farmhand breakfasts flocked to Battle Creek
• How tempering keeps grain from turning to paste under the rollers
• C.W. Post, the rival who took what he learned as a patient and built an empire
• Sugar as the betrayal that permanently split the brothers
• Rice Krispies in 1928, the 1957 rooster mascot and cornflakes as a global baking ingredient