by Moe Zilla

Created on: January 25, 2009

There was a time when Americans didn't eat cereal for breakfast. And they were also very unhealthy. But in the late 1800s, A colorful diet evangelist named John Kellogg founded a health spa in Battle Creek, Michigan - and launched the beginning of America's attachment to crunchy breakfast food. Now Americans buy 2.7 billion packages of breakfast cereal each year - and "Cerealizing America" traces fun and fascinating stories along the way.

"If laid end to end, the empty cereal boxes from one year's consumption would stretch to the moon - and back." That's one of the "Amazing Cereal Statistics" presented in the introduction, which starts the book off with appropriate enthusiasm. Each chapter gets a funny title - like "Apocalypse Chow" or "Manifest Stomachache." Even the book's cover is cheerful, using bright yellow letters on a background of children's cereal boxes. There's the smiling alien Quisp, and an ultra-cool package of "Pink Panther Flakes." And the introduction reminds us that in the last century, "more than 1,000 cereal brands have been created in the United States alone."

But the zany tone is matched by some serious historical research. It's only after a visit to Kellogg's health spa that a rival is inspired to start his own cereal company - C.W. Post. It's a classic American tale of enterprise and ambition, and as history marches through each decade - breakfast cereals are there. Cereal played an important role in sponsoring radio shows - maybe too important. Local sports announcers once received a threat from

General Mills, telling them to only describe baseball players who'd endorsed Wheaties.

America
marches on - and so does the importance of breakfast cereals. By the 1960s, an entire cartoon was even created for Saturday mornings populated by nothing but cereal brand mascots. "Linus the Lion-Hearted" last several years, though it's now illegal to broadcast it. "[T]he Federal Communications Commission ruled in 1969 that children's televesion shows could not feature characters associated with specific products..." And during the cold war, the Lone Ranger had a special giveway in Kix cereal: the Kix atom bomb ring. America's kids were a little fuzzy on their history, as the 19th-century cowboy promised a "seething, scientific sensation" - a gold-plated ring shaped like a miniature warhead. General Mills ultimately mailed out over six million of them.

There's hundreds of fascinating stories in this book. (In 1956 "Confidential" magazine claimed that Frank Sinatra was "the Tarzan of the boudoir" because he ate his Wheaties.) And there's even eight pages of wonderful photos documenting all the pop culture craziness. "Cerealizing America" delivers a lot of history. But it's also a lot of fun.

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