OnlyFans, Corn Flakes & the Taliban

We ignore the undercurrents of culture at our own peril

We see cultural currents, and it’s easy to think these are organic shifts in the way society thinks. We often don’t realize how society is being carefully shaped and manipulated by special interests. Take breakfast, for example.

(Breakfast, you say? I know, bear with me.)

“Breakfast is the most important meal of the day!” A sentence any mother may be heard saying to her kids. A sentence we may all have repeated at some point. Random? Nah. This was a marketing campaign created by General Foods, manufacturer of Grape Nuts, to sell us more cereal.

So, let’s talk about breakfast cereal.

In the mid-nineteenth century, breakfast would consist of whatever was available. There was no prescribed staple for this meal. Some ate pastries, some ate steak, or boiled chicken. All of this changed when Dr. John Harvey Kellogg and his brother Will started the Kellogg’s Cereal Company. Dr.John Harvey Kellogg was an interesting character. He worked fifteen-hour days. As a surgeon, he performed over 22,000 procedures in his lifetime — mostly abdominal surgeries. And he had a very low mortality rate. He didn’t ask for compensation for his medical work. Among his patients were Henry Ford, Amelia Earhart and President William Howard Taft.

Dr. Kellogg was also an avowed racist and eugenicist. He believed that “the intellectual inferiority of the Negro male to the European male is universally acknowledged.” He spoke openly about his racism against Asian folk, calling them “the yellow peril.”

He was a weird dude.

How weird, you ask? He was terrified and disgusted by sex. So much so that he never consummated his own relationship with his wife. He firmly believed masturbation was a sin. He believed a bland diet would lower the libido of teenage boys. He started an aggressive campaign to promote circumcision for male babies, in an effort to make it impossible for boys to masturbate. And his campaign was wildly successful. So successful, in fact, that today NOT circumcising a male baby in the United States is seen as unusual.