Philipp Mimkes from the Coalition against BAYER Dangers said:
Being a part of the infamous IG Farben, BAYER was involved in the cruellest crimes in human history. A subsidiary supplied Zyklon B for the gas chambers. The company built a giant new factory directly at Auschwitz. To accommodate the slave workers, the corporation operated its own concentration camp. More than 30,000 labourers were worked to death. The company’s commitment to supply fuel, munitions and rubber was vital for Hitler to wage international war.
Chapter Seven
Kellogg’s: Corn Flakes and the War On Sex
Nineteenth century ideas about living ‘the good life’ once involved an inordinate amount of consumption and excess, and with that inevitably came poor health. This trend meant that health concerns were a huge part of the developing world near the end of the nineteenth century. It is difficult to imagine the terror that must have come with most illness in the era before vaccines and modern medicine. There was a widespread distrust of doctors in that time, and who could blame them? The practice of medicine was often as, or even more, barbaric and painful than the diseases that could ail you. We often hear people talking about ‘quack-medicine’ nowadays in a novelty sense, but looking back, pretty much all medical practice in the past has the appearance of quack medicine.
It was from this era of decadence that a need was born for a healthier way of living. There were several visionaries in the forefront of this movement, but few as famous, or rather infamous, as Dr John Harvey Kellogg. John Harvey and his younger brother, Will Keith, put their collective minds together to create a healthy food substitute, a cereal flake that would someday become known as Corn Flakes. The role of this rather plain dietary flake was to help one live a pure and healthy existence, but the history that surrounds it is anything but bland. The man behind the most famous breakfast cereal in America was also ardently in support of abstinence from masturbation, sexual arousal and sexual intercourse of any kind. He was also a ecumenist and a racial purist. The breakfast cereal revolution was about to begin and the two Kellogg brothers would be divided forever by the opposing forces of fanaticism and greed over a distinctly American breakfast icon.
A young John Harvey Kellogg was the fifth son of humble Michigan frontier parents, John Preston and Anne Kellogg. Times were hard, but the Kellogg family kept their faith in God while they struggled to find their way. John was born on 26 February 1852 in Tyrone Township, a small Michigan rural community. John was a rather sickly child, being stricken by tuberculosis, which was often a death sentence in those days. The prolific disease wouldn’t have a vaccine until 1921 and wouldn’t be utilised on a wide scale until the 1950s. The stifling disease would keep John Harvey out of school until he was 9 years of age.
There is a story that is often re-told about John witnessing a boyhood friend being bled on a table right in front of him. John Harvey was so disturbed by the sight of the boy’s blood, he exclaimed to his mother that he when he grew up, he wanted to be anything but a doctor. The statement is almost ironic; John Harvey Kellogg was not a doctor in the same way as the ‘professionals’ who had fumbled through medicine before him. No, John Harvey would be a whole new type of doctor, practising what was, for that time, a revolutionary new way of thinking; one he would personally help pioneer and make famous.
The Kelloggs eventually moved to Battle Creek, Michigan, where his father, without much enthusiasm, began the task of manufacturing brooms, a venture that proved to be a more successful avenue for the family. The Kellogg boys would soon join their father at work in the broom factory. Not everyone in those days, just as it is now, was cut out for the physical labour and long hours of factory work. It was during this time as a teenager that John Harvey realised he was not cut out for a life of manual labour. John, who had spent much of his youth in a frail state, was far more of a reader and preferred delving into a good book to working with his hands. His aspirations inspired him to become a school teacher, a perfectly noble and viable profession of the era, but one he would never pursue.
Instead, John found himself on the path to addressing and treating matters of health and wellbeing. It was religion that brought this new path into Kellogg’s life. The Kellogg family, as it turns out, had become devout followers of the Seventh Day Adventist church, a new religion that had branched off from the Millerism movement. The followers of Millerism were still struggling to reform and find their way after the very specific ‘second coming of Jesus’ event, which their leader had pivoted their beliefs on, never took place. The event, referred as the ‘Great Disappointment’ was supposed to have taken place on 22 October 1844.
The Kelloggs were so involved in the Adventist Church that they donated a portion of the proceeds from the sale of their home when they moved from Tyrone Township to Battle Creek to fund the Adventist Church when they moved their publishing activities from Rochester, New York, to Battle Creek. The Kellogg family may have been in financial support of the Church, but John Harvey took his involvement to a far deeper level.
The Adventist Church had only a handful of leaders who helped with its formation; two of the more prominent were James and Ellen G. White. The Whites were a major influencing force within the Adventist movement and the prophetic visions that Ellen White claimed to experience were frequent and taken as gospel, not only into how they should be living their lives and forming the religion, but sometimes even foretelling the future. Ellen’s visions moved those who followed the religion towards keeping their body pure by rejecting many drinks, such as alcohol, coffee, and even tea. The entire Adventist movement also became vegetarian, feeling that eating the flesh of animals was an unclean act that would further serve to harm their bodies. The main theme of the religion was to truly purify the body. The original hope was that if the followers made their bodies and minds as pure as possible, then it might invite the second coming of Jesus Christ. The Adventists explained away the Great Disappointment by deciding that they were too unclean to be in the presence of the Lord, so their great quest of purity was everything to them.
John Harvey Kellogg was the source of one of Ellen’s ‘visions’. Ellen White came to her husband and explained that she had experienced a vision from God, which revealed to her that John Harvey Kellogg would someday be a very important part of their movement. It was from this moment forward that the Whites and the Adventist movement began to invest heavily in John Harvey’s future, something that would change his life, and the world, forever.
In 1864 the 12-year-old John Harvey Kellogg officially began working for the Adventist church, printing and distributing propaganda pamphlets. James White took John Harvey under his wing and taught him the ins and outs of the church’s publishing venture. One of the primary subjects of the Adventist pamphlets was Ellen White’s articles on health and wellbeing. It was during this time that Kellogg would gain interest in the subject of the human body, since it was his job to set the type for the articles.
At the age of 14 John Harvey devoted himself to becoming a vegetarian, a vow that he would sustain for the rest of his life. That same year, on 5 September 1866, the Adventists opened a convalescent home, called the Western Health Reform Institute in Battle Creek. He didn’t know it at the time, but this moment would become integral in Kellogg’s life, because it was there that he would make his lasting mark on the world and start a whole new industry that still goes strong today.