Happiness is hardly the right word for us, we should be satisfied with a little peace, a good understanding between us and fewer misfortunes….
He did not get his wish. In September 1898 Elizabeth was stabbed in the heart by an Italian anarchist as she boarded a ferry on Lake Geneva. Luigi Lucheni had traveled to Geneva to assassinate the Duke of Orleans but couldn’t find him. Hearing that empress was in the vicinity he took his chance, saying afterward: “I wanted to kill a royal, it didn’t matter which one.” As Elizabeth lay dying, a doctor forced a sugar lump soaked in brandy between her lips, an ironic final touch for a woman who today would have been diagnosed as suffering from an eating disorder. Always destined to play the tragic heroine, a few days earlier she had confided to her companion, Countess Sztaray, that she felt “a vast longing to lie in a good large coffin and simply find rest, nothing but rest.”
Dr. John Harvey Kellogg (1852–1943) had a simple slogan: “Eat what the monkey eats, simple food and not too much of it.” His advice went against the grain for large numbers of his fellow Americans, who were then, as now, fond of red meat and white bread. Concerned with the dangers of constipation and a “slow colon,” Kellogg advised that healthy people should give themselves enemas at least three times each week. He published more than fifty books, many of them alerting the public to the dire consequences of masturbation—or “self-pollution,” as he called it—lest it make them idle, spotty, and depressed, and in the case of boys, stunt their height. At 5 feet 4 inches, perhaps he knew something he wasn’t telling. Although Kellogg and his wife, Ella, fostered forty-two children and adopted seven of them, they never had sex. On his wedding night, he sat up into the small hours working on one of his most successful books,
As a young man John Harvey was chosen by Ellen G. White, the founder of Seventh-Day Adventism, to help run the Western Health Reform Institute in Battle Creek, Michigan, which she had founded in 1866. Recognizing Kellogg as energetic and a fast learner, she subsidized his study of medicine in New York. One of her beliefs was that vegetarianism was part of the path to enlightenment. Studying at Bellevue Hospital, Kellogg had a strict breakfast regime of seven water biscuits and an apple, with the weekly luxury of a coconut and very occasionally some oatmeal or potatoes. However, he struggled to buy healthy grains and cereals that were easy to prepare and, returning fully qualified to Battle Creek in 1876, he set out to develop simple foods that opened up the bowels at least three times a day. From these experiments emerged granola and, in due course, the world’s most popular breakfast cereal, Kellogg’s cornflakes.
Battle Creek’s three principles were exercise, diet, and purging the body of impurities. But Kellogg was also a skilled surgeon, performing more than twenty thousand operations during his career—as many as twenty-five a day at his peak—and he was still operating at the age of eighty-eight. Trained as a gynecologist, he also specialized in removing hemorrhoids. Patients on the table received a cleansing enema of lukewarm water, and to reduce postoperative shock, their beds were packed with warm sandbags. Kellogg also sprinkled lactose on their wounds to prevent infection. Although he kept his patients confined to bed immediately after surgery, he believed in exercise to aid recovery, sometimes stimulating their muscles with painless electric shocks.
John Harvey Kellogg’s younger brother, William, began as his assistant, but was to go on to found the family cereal empire, originally called the Battle Creek Toasted Cornflake Company. Although John Harvey recognized that the sanatorium needed to function as a business, he didn’t like the idea of using his methods for commercial gain. William was more practical and—crucially—was willing to add sugar to the cornflakes to make them more palatable to a wider market. The Kellogg brothers fell out over this and didn’t speak to each other for the last thirty years of their lives. While William became a wealthy man, John Harvey plowed his salary back into running the sanatorium and endowing hospital beds in India and China. The royalties from his books were used to feed and clothe his enormous brood of foster children.
As well as abstaining from red meat, John Harvey Kellogg advocated fresh air and the consumption of nuts, even writing a paper titled “Nuts May Save the Race.” He was an early proponent of yogurt and tofu and, long before Jane Fonda was born, a believer in exercising to music in order to relieve boredom. Columbia Records issued a set of five phonograph records to accompany his booklet on exercise. Kellogg also dabbled in eugenics (improving human health and intelligence by selective breeding) and was a founder of the “Race Betterment Foundation.”
Many of Kellogg’s theories, once thought to be outlandish, have since been vindicated. He was one of the first doctors to campaign against smoking. He argued that cow’s milk was unsuitable for invalids and that salt should not be added to food, and he was one of the first to state that a diet high in animal fats and dairy products was ultimately unhealthy. He also recognized that vegetable oils were preferable to lard, suet, and butter. His system of Biologic Living was aimed at promoting “good digestion, sound sleep, a clear head, a placid mind and joy to be alive.” Part of that system involved sleeping outdoors “watching the squirrels gamboling” and relying on fruit, nuts, and berries for sustenance, a simple life that Kellogg said would allow people “to listen to the music of the spheres.” He applied his theories to his own life, getting by on four hours’ sleep a night and staying fit and healthy until he succumbed to pneumonia at ninety-one.
The founder of another, even more successful, American business dynasty also paid close attention to diet and exercise. At the age of seventy-five Henry Ford (1863–1947) could still do handstands. In his late fifties he impressed friends by leaping into the air and kicking a cigar off the mantelpiece. He attributed his physical fitness to avoiding anything that might poison his body. Like Kellogg, he saw white bread as a major enemy and sternly warned his friends and associates against it. He always drank his water warm, believing that the body wasted energy heating it up if it were drunk cold. He never took sugar because he thought the sharp edges on the crystals were like pieces of glass that could damage internal organs, until it was pointed out to him that the crystals dissolve when wet.
For a time in the 1920s Ford tried eating only wheat—which he held to be a miracle food. His doctor told him he was starving to death; this was demonstrated by experimenting with pigs fed only wheat. When they almost died, Henry was persuaded to vary his diet. In 1926 he decided that carrots were a magical cure-all and devised a meal made up of fourteen different carrot recipes. In 1927 he announced that pigs, cows, and chickens would soon be “redundant” because he was working on a biscuit made of wheat germ, oatmeal, pecan, and olive oil that would be sufficient for all human dietary needs. The “wonderfood” biscuit never went into mass production but that didn’t stop Ford’s relentless dietary experimentation. No one was spared. Businessmen and friends invited to lunch at Ford’s mansion near Detroit were faced with what Ford called “roadside greens,” including stewed burdock and soybean-bread sandwiches with a filling of milkweed.
This attitude to food reveals much about Ford’s attitude to life in general. For him, control was of paramount importance. In
It was an insight that changed the world. What we now call the consumer society was practically invented by Henry Ford: The idea that we “consume” goods in the same way we consume food was entirely new. The first recorded use of the word
We do not know what electricity can do, but I take for granted that it cannot do everything. Keep on with your engine. If you can get what you are after, I can see a great future.
