A Geography of Digestion: Biotechnology and the Kellogg Cereal Enterprise
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A Geography of Digestion: Biotechnology and the Kellogg Cereal Enterprise
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520961180 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 10/25/2016 |
| Series: | California Studies in Food and Culture , #62 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| File size: | 7 MB |
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A Geography of Digestion
Biotechnology and the Kellogg Cereal Enterprise
By Nicholas Bauch
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2017 The Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-96118-0
CHAPTER 1
The Battle Creek Sanitarium
A PLACE OF HEALTH
In June 1863, not yet a month after the official inauguration of the Seventh-day Adventist religious sect, God spoke to its visionary leader, Ellen G. White. While at a friend's home in the southwestern Michigan town of Otsego, the "prophetess" lapsed into a dramatic trance, waking with a clear set of hygienic health laws. Though purportedly divine, the substance of her vision borrowed from the swirl of messages being pronounced by other mid-nineteenth-century health reformers: eat a vegetarian diet, avoid alcohol and tobacco, maintain personal hygiene, do not overindulge or overwork. In the case of sickness, medicinal drugs were to be avoided, replaced with natural and preventative solutions such as fresh air or hydrotherapy.
These dictates, pillars of what historians generally call the American health reform movement, came from a variety of Protestant millennialist characters repulsed by the medical establishment, who believed fundamentally that maintaining one's corporeal health was a religious duty performed in anticipation of the second, judging, advent of Christ. Sylvester Graham, William Alcott, Joel Shew, Horace Mann, R.T. Trall, and James C. Jackson were the most influential health reformers surrounding Ellen White both before and after her 1863 vision. While the contents of White's vision did not significantly diverge from that of the other health reformers, she captured the essence of the message in an energetic, compelling, and practicable way for thousands of people by giving health a place where it could be practiced with religion.
This chapter narrates the origins of the Seventh-day Adventist sect and the genealogy of the Battle Creek Sanitarium, as well as John Kellogg's food-based approach to medicine. Three topics arise in the course of this narrative: (1) the way that early Adventists understood bodies in relation to nature and medicine; (2) the importance of place in nineteenth-century healing practices, and in particular hydrotherapy's position as the predecessor to Kellogg's thinking; and (3) the seeming contradictions between science and nature (including the specific attributes of places) in Kellogg's ideas of health. The latter half of the nineteenth century was an era of great change in what it meant to be a professional physician. Together, White and Kellogg were a part of this change; studying their program of healing lends insight into the widespread uncertainty concerning how medical practitioners should adopt scientific insights about the body and disease. Kellogg found himself treading these uncertain waters frequently, adjusting his advice as his own understanding about digestion developed. A goal of this chapter is to link Kellogg's philosophy of digestion with the broader landscapes in which it developed — to describe, that is, how the landscapes of Battle Creek and its hinterlands became therapeutic ones, agents in the brand of healing undertaken by Kellogg at the sanitarium he invented.
Over the second half of the nineteenth century, the substance of White's vision would help generate an international following consisting of people seeking health and spirituality. Along with a prolific publishing house, the turn to health in the early years of the sect would prove its most successful strategy in concretizing a shared set of beliefs among its congregants, as well as its most lasting legacy. Notable food items popularized at the Battle Creek Sanitarium that are still considered staples of health include peanut butter, soy milk, and corn flakes. However, the development of the Seventh-day Adventist diet happened within the context of a broader concern for bodily well-being. Health became paramount to Ellen White and her adherents because it was a means of practicing their religion, a way to prepare for God's impending rapture. Because cultivating health was a set of actions determined by divine rule, the performance of health could be done together, in a communal, educational space. While one could spend a lifetime critiquing the veracity of Ellen White's visions, it is hard to dismiss the relevancy of her insistence on building an architectural manifestation of her health message. Just as a church is a building where people go to share spiritual practice — to make ideas real — White realized that a place of healing would galvanize her and others' enthusiasm for the ideas in her health message, just as the sect was beginning to grow large. Months after her vision on that day in June 1863, Ellen White wrote the following: "I saw that it was a sacred duty to attend to our health, and arouse others to their duty. ... We have a duty to speak, to come out against intemperance of every kind — intemperance in working, in eating, in drinking, in drugging — and then point them to God's great medicine: water, pure soft water, for diseases, for health, for cleanliness, for luxury. ... The more perfect our health, the more perfect will be our labor."
These abstract ideas became dictates, and the dictates became practice. But the practice still needed a place in which it could be developed, performed, taught, discussed, and evangelized. White believed that if there was a place free from ridicule where people could congregate and observe how the health practices actually worked, then she would achieve her "duty" to speak out against intemperance of every kind. What would become by the late twentieth century a global pattern of Seventh-day Adventist health-care infrastructure started just down the road from Otsego, in the nearby town of Battle Creek, Michigan. At her home there, Ellen White forged ahead with the implementation of her plan to build a place where people would "learn to stay well."
PLACES OF HEALING
What are the characteristics of a place of healing, where people learn to stay well? Spa towns are instructive in seeing how places curative or ameliorating to body and mind become produced. The modern construction of spa towns in Europe during the late eighteenth century and into the nineteenth followed a predictable pattern. A water or spring source was discovered in a rural or forested setting, which was then promoted by local business interests. A key step in the popularization of the water source was an accreditation by a chemist, followed by "a medical account of cures to be found at the place, preferably produced by a reputable physician." Promoters channeled these chemical and medical reports to elite communities, both local and distant, using them to differentiate among the varying curative properties found among the various spas. Promoters, in essence, tried to match their places with a discrete set of illnesses, each spa offering a particular constellation of environmental factors promising to heal in specific ways. Though the granularity of distinction among spa towns never developed past a broad categorization of healing properties, the increasing success of spa towns is evidence of a clientele that valued the rhetoric of science — one that wanted to believe there was a place that could definitively make things better, and that experts had already done the work to prove it. The natural, curative properties held by spa towns, however, could not be exported. That is, as much as the waters of the spa were thought to heal, so too did the unique situated-ness of the town itself play a role in the process of getting well. The act of traveling to a distant, unpopulated setting — often in or near mountains, and often not easy to get to — has historically been a hallmark not only of spas, but also of other typical healing places.
It is significant that what would become the Battle Creek Sanitarium — the place of healing in which John Kellogg would develop his brand of eating, digestion, and health — is a direct descendant of the European spa town. Healing at a spa required the corporeal co-presence of patient and place. Whatever ensemble of curative agents on which any one spa relied could be activated only on location. The thought of reproducing somewhere else the sometimes quasi, sometimes full-on spiritual quality of healing that transcended the sum of its parts was antithetical to the philosophy of going to the spa. That is, like most any travel experience, it was impossible to reproduce what it was like to be there.
Ironically, the logic used by chemists and physicians to convince would-be patients of a spa's reputability took an opposite tack. Whereas it became fashionable to travel to a remote place (the journey itself marking a commitment to dissolving disease) in order to gain the site-specific qualities of health, scientific explanations rested on the reproducibility of their results in other places. If the conditions of an experiment could not be re-created in another laboratory in another country by a different practitioner, then the rhetoric of science could neither predict nor speak with the tone of authority that the minerals found in spas would definitively change the physical state of one's body. Iron, for example, was iron, whether found in Michigan or Austria. To the chemist, geography was secondary, as minerals like iron, or saline, would affect people's health the same way whether found in a natural chalybeate or packaged and carried home to a city house and used there in the bathtub. If chemical analysis was no more than idiosyncratic observation, then there could be no guarantee of amelioration and no distinction between the real water cures and the quacks.
But geographers who study the history of science have pointed out that science has actually never traveled well, arguing that the location of a scientific endeavor makes a difference to the conduct of the experiment and that location — even of laboratories — affects the content of the results. The concept of a geography of science runs counter to our intuition because it is believed that science is a universal undertaking, not a provincial practice. This same intuition informed late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century visitors to spas, who tended to base their decisions on the infallible, universal facts of health while simultaneously holding the view that the most provincial, most place-based, least transposable characteristics of a spa would equally contribute to remaking their bodies. This contradiction of modern thought generated the intellectual ferment from which were erected curative places, most notably water cures, on the face of European and American rural landscapes.
One of these curative places was the Western Health Reform Institute, which opened in 1866 after three years of nationwide rallying and planning among the Seventh-day Adventist leadership. It was the first of many iterations of a place that can be characterized as equal parts hospital, retreat, hotel, university, and homeopathic clinic. In those early years Ellen White wrote substantially for the Adventist journal The Health Reformer on topics ranging from the dangers of caffeinated drinks to the benefits of loose-fitting clothing. Despite her direct engagement with the journal, when it came to the institute she preferred to retain the role of visionary, keeping a distance between herself and the day-to-day implementation of that vision. Ellen White needed someone to lead the medical operations of the institute, a spokesperson and arm for her vision to change the eating, hygienic, and sexual habits of the world.
When the doors of the institute opened in 1866, the man chosen for the job was Horatio S. Lay. Starting his medical career as an allopathic (mainstream) doctor in Allegan, Michigan, Lay joined the Seventh-day Adventist church in 1856 and became interested in alternative medical practices. When he heard about Ellen White's health vision in 1863, he was one of the first to encourage her by pointing out the similarities of her vision with that of many other contemporary health reformers, notably Sylvester Graham and William Alcott. The relationship between Lay and White was forged deeply enough that White hired him as first director of the Western Health Reform Institute. In the institute's first four years, Lay and his small nursing staff of Adventist farm women — donating their time from the fields — treated hundreds of patients with a series of hydrotherapeutic baths and showers. Coupled with a regimented vegetarian diet served only twice a day (allowing food to fully digest), White's brand of "the natural cure" had found a place where it could be consistently practiced. A circular describing the institute stated that "no drugs whatever will be administered, but only such means employed as NATURE can best use in her recuperative work, such as Water, Air, Light, Heat, Food, Sleep, Rest, Recreation, &c. Our tables will be furnished with a strictly healthful diet, consisting of Vegetables, Grains, and Fruits, which are found in great abundance and variety in this State."
After its grand opening, lodging at the institute quickly filled to capacity. Lay and White seemed to have tapped a nerve, a widespread desire among the Adventist followers to be taught how to behave to achieve an earthly, corporeal state of being most conducive to spiritual longevity in the afterlife. Construction of the institute created a place in which a lifestyle defined by specific health principles could be easily and unabashedly attained. The institute brought together "proper" building design with its own experts in hydrotherapy and diet, and surrounded its patients with other likeminded people seeking to live systematically and healthfully. White and Lay intentionally severed the institute's practice of being healthy from medical science. They used methods ranging from outdoor gardening to dress reform instead of surgery and medicinal drugs. They taught people to avoid processed sugar and alcohol, instead serving fruits and grains at every meal.
Ellen White's impulse to turn a two-story Battle Creek farmhouse into a health retreat-clinic was not without precedent. Hers was a particularly geographical solution to the problem of how one might practice being healthy. Her answer, like that of her predecessors, was that the practice of being healthy benefited from having the necessary technologies and knowledge bundled together in the same place, a place that was necessarily an alternative from high-society Americans' way of living. Daily routines for patients at the Western Health Reform Institute — and later the Battle Creek Sanitarium — had to diverge significantly enough from what they were used to such that they felt divorced from their own culture, and embedded temporarily into a new one. For example, upon his departure from the sanitarium in 1890, one visitor reported that "electricity is extensively called into use. The Swedish movement is also applied by ingeniously constructed machinery and well trained attendants. Massage, pneumatic and vacuum treatment, and sun-baths are resorted to. No treatment, in fact, is discarded which can be successfully utilized."
This pronouncement describes a series of practices about which other potential visitors might have heard rumor, but not to which they would have had regular access. Electric shock, vacuums, and sun baths were newfangled technologies that drew attention to the sanitarium as a place where one could experiment with these healing machines in the care of a professional staff.
HYDROTHERAPY INSTITUTIONS
The most immediate and inspiring precedent for White came from the establishment where her first lead physician, Horatio Lay, received his hydrotherapy training. When Lay departed from allopathic medicine and sought out alternative practices, he went to Dansville, New York, to a water cure known as "Our Home on the Hillside." Opened in 1859 by James C. Jackson, the founding member of the American Vegetarian Society, Our Home employed exercise, fresh air, temperance, healthy foods, and pure water to treat patients. The essence of Jackson's water cure is found in his outright rejection of the substances and preparations that were commonly used in the mid-nineteenth-century practice of medicine, a position attractive to Lay and White. Born in an era when chemicals tended to harm as much as cure patients, Jackson's etiology was founded on balancing the body's "vital" forces. In other words, diseases were not substances inside the body that awaited expulsion at the hand of a physician with drugs and tools, but rather were the manifestation of an overall "morbid condition" brought on by poor lifestyle choices, like the consumption of caffeine or alcohol, too much sex, or wearing clothes that fit too tightly. As Jackson himself hyperbolically wrote: "In my entire practice I have never given a dose of medicine; not so much as I should have administered had I taken a homeopathic pellet of the seven-millionth dilution, and dissolving it in Lake Superior, given my patients of its waters."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Geography of Digestion by Nicholas Bauch. Copyright © 2017 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
List of IllustrationsIntroduction: Spatially Extending the Digestive System
1. The Battle Creek Sanitarium: A Place of Health
2. Scientific Eating: Kellogg’s Philosophy of the Modern Stomach
3. Flaked Cereal: The Moment of Invention
4. Extending the Digestive System into the Urban Landscape
5. The Systematization of Agriculture
6. Breakfast Cereal in the Twentieth Century
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index