In 1863, Dr. James C. Jackson a vegetarian who operated the Dansville Sanitarium in Dansville, New York, advocated eating healthy food. He took graham flour baked it and broke it up into small pieces.
This was the first breakfast cereal and he called it granula. Jackson’s granula experiment was the beginning of a new concept in breakfast foods that would eventually change the way many Americans started the day.
Jackson’s health food was made by rolling a coarse whole meal dough into thin sheets which were baked until they were hard and brittle loaves. The crisp cookie-like material was broken and ground into small chunks, the chunks were again baked and finally fragmented into small granules.
The resulting coarse nuggets had to be reconstituted with liquid for a minimum of twenty minutes or preferably overnight before they were eaten.
Dr James C. Jackson and breakfast cereal
