04/07/2023
« 🇫🇷 people don’t eat granola, it’s 🐴 food »
Someone gave that response when my husband asked to a local store if they were carrying granola! 😅
A friend whose parents are farmers in the south west region of France 🇫🇷(close to where I was born) told me that their parents give their animals eg. rabbits, cows, some cereal mix close to granola ingredients but they don’t call it granola for sure. Well…in 🇫🇷 there are actually some horse treats, called « granola », like candy made of glucose syrup, wheat, oats, and sugar cane.
The Granola as we know it today originated in the 🇺🇸
Granola as a breakfast cereal can be traced back to gruel-eating ancient Greeks, but it wasn’t until the 19th century that the idea of eating cold cereal was embraced. In 1863, Dr. James Caleb Jackson, a health reformer who believed illness was rooted in the stomach, began experimenting with cold cereal to augment the mineral-spring treatments at his sanitarium in upstate New York.
He baked graham flour into brittle cakes, which he then crumbled and baked again. It was not an immediate success; in fact, it was edible only when soaked in milk overnight. Even so, Jackson’s granula, as he called it, would soon have competition. It was not long before Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, a Michigan man with a sanitarium of his own, was also promoting a healthful cold cereal.
Kellogg ran the Battle Creek Sanitarium, popular with luminaries like Amelia Earhart. He, too, was a digestive evangelist, and in the late 1870s or early ’80s, Kellogg combined wheat flour, oatmeal and cornmeal into a mixture that he also called granula. Jackson sued. Kellogg duly switched the “u” to an “o,” and by 1889, he was selling two tons of granola a week.
Kellogg went on to invent the cereal flake, which led to the Kellogg’s cereal empire, which led to Froot Loops and Cocoa Krispies.
The Granola name is revived by the modern health food movement, it becomes a "hippie" health food in the 1960's and finally, today granola has gone mainstream.
CQFD.
Voilà! happy rainy July 4th ☔️
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