The Blindboy Podcast - Victorian Sex Communes and Breakfast Cereal

Episode Date: August 25, 2021

Extremely hot take. I trace breakfast cutlery and breakfast cereal to two opposing victorian sex communes Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Take a leave in Tenerife, you weaselly ephes. Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. If you're a brand new listener, go back and listen to some earlier episodes. Maybe consider beginning from the start. And if you're a regular listener, you know the crack. First off, a little update on my cats. Last two weeks, you know that one of my cats has been very sick. Naportandi. She was drooling excessively. She wasn't eating. She was incredibly weak. I thought she was going to die.

She's a wild cat so I couldn't capture her to bring her to a vet. She's now doing fine. the day after last week's podcast I fed her a pouch of wet cat food and now she couldn't eat and her mouth was incredibly sore and she was drooling and as she opened her mouth to eat this food because she couldn't

she opened her mouth really wide and then an abscess burst in her mouth and then she was immediately relieved and she ate an entire fucking pouch of cat food and she drank one pint of water and she's been absolutely fine since then so she she's now back to normal she's back to normal health so i'm incredibly happy with that and it means i'm not under pressure to catch her to catch her so now I'm gonna get a wild cat trap from the vet when they have it and I'll be able to catch her while she's healthy and bring her into the vet and get the vet to look at her mouth but most importantly

she's not suffering anymore and I'm not afraid that she's like my big fear was that she wasn't eating and I'm like she's starving to death because she was starting to crawl instead of walk and I was like I'm fighting against the clock here how do I catch this cat and bring her to a vet before she fucking starves to death which would have broken my heart because of the amount of suffering but she's not now she's eating normally she. But she's not now. She's eating normally. She's happy. She's back grooming herself. Everything's normal,

and I can gather the care that she needs in a leisurely fashion. So fair play, Napper Tandy. Thank you to everyone who sent me lovely messages of support and were asking about her as well. I did my first live gig in nearly two years as well at the weekend which was lovely it was a lovely experience it was in Kilmainham Kilmainham Gardens

behind the Irish Museum of Modern Art and even before I went on stage one of the sound men said to me before you go on stage can you tell me how your cat is which was fantastic so the sound man was listening to the podcast.

But I did the gig. It was lovely. It was lovely and not lovely at the same time. It was lovely to simply be back doing a gig and to be there with a crowd of people. Also, it was lovely because I was scared. I was like, fuck, I haven't gigged in nearly two years and going out in front of

an audience and being on stage and speaking for like two hours that's kind of frightening I hope I'll still be able to do it and I was it was lovely because the gig went really well my guest Jim Sheridan the director was just fucking fantastic

we spoke all about the mechanics of storytelling and filmmaking and it was just such a pleasure because I'm talking to a person who's an expert in their field like this is fucking Jim Sheridan he directed in the name of the father the field you know so we had a crack in chat and the audience really loved it and I got some positive feedback positive messages afterwards from people who were there so that was lovely I spent the whole day before going through an exhaustive checklist of everything that needs to happen in order for me to do a gig because again like I said I would have had this nailed down like a routine but you don't do it in two years

I have to go into my head and go okay what's doing a gig like what phone numbers do I need to have who do I ring when I get to the venue all this type of shit for me also there's an extra set of challenges when I do a gig that other performers don't have to deal with because I've got a fucking plastic bag in my head.

So if Tommy Tiernan is doing a gig, right? Tommy Tiernan can walk up to the venue before the gig and security are there and everyone who's working there is there and they go, ah, there's Tommy Tiernan, the guy who's gigging here tonight. That doesn't happen for all blind boy, because I wear a bag on my head, and I obviously don't wear this bag on my head all the time. So when I do a gig, it's a bit different.

I walk up to the gig early and security are there and I'm like, what's the crack? I'm actually headlining this place tonight. And they're like, who the fuck are you? I don't know who the fuck you are. And then I point at the poster, and the poster is some fella with a bag in his head and i'm not wearing my bag in my head and then i don't want to put the bag in my head there and then because we're outside the venue and it's public and i don't want someone seeing so there's unique uh fucking situations when i do a gig so it means i have to have a load of phone numbers in advance of like the venue manager and all this stuff and I have to ring him and I have to say will you come down and meet me

outside the venue before we go in so you can tell everybody that I'm definitely who I say I am and then there's no problems but uh cracking gig I chatted with the filmmaker Jim Sheridan we had a lovely conversation. The only thing about the gig that was, I don't want to say negative. The only downer for the gig was I felt a bit sorry for the audience because of the COVID restrictions. So we were up and I was up on stage on this huge fucking stage, like a giant stage. And then it was an open air gig it was this field this big large field there was only 400 people there which isn't a large crowd so there

was 400 people and they all had to sit kind of in picnic tables that were 10 feet apart. So you had a small audience that were spread over a huge area. And what that did is you didn't have a sense of a crowd. Like, it was odd. Like, I'm gigging 15 fucking years at this stage now. So I know when I'm on stage I understand what I'd call crowd empathy. Which means

a crowd together at a gig have a collective sense of empathy if you make a joke at a gig the crowd kind of all laugh as one or the crowd react as one that's the beauty of a live experience and that wasn't happening at this gig because people were too far apart for that collective crowd empathy to occur and that was the only thing about the gig that was strange I'd drop a joke and it would get a laugh from one table over there but then that empathy wouldn't reach across to the other table over there so that felt a bit odd and also what was extra annoying is while I was doing my gig in Dublin in the fucking gardens of Kilmainham where you've got 400 people under intense COVID restrictions

like 10 minutes down the road the all Ireland Harland final was happening where 40 000 people were permitted to attend a match outdoors and it just felt a bit shit it's like how come 40 000 people can attend a ga game but only 400 people can attend a live podcast with intense restrictions and that was annoying because it showed that the government basically has a robust plan in place for people who want to enjoy sports but doesn't have a robust plan in place for people who want to enjoy art and that was disappointing um even though it was limerick were playing in the. All Ireland final. Ireland final. And Limerick won. Won fucking.

Beat the living shit out of Cork. So that was absolutely amazing. And. I'm not. So I don't really. I don't like sports. You'll know from listening to this podcast. I don't have the gift of appreciating sports.

But I have a huge amount of respect for. For Harlan. For a game like fucking harlan because it's thousands of years old and it's irish culture from before we were colonized and it's still massively relevant like it's it's still part of our culture today in a really important way so i have the utmost respect for that but so I'm not pissed off at the match the GA match if you get me I'm pissed off at the government for not giving a fuck about the arts it's it's insulting and I don't have a hot take as to why the government appears to value

sports over arts and culture I don't know why that is, but it's very definitely the case. So this week I have an incredibly hot take. This week is going to be kind of a history slash culture podcast. Last few weeks I've been focusing on Irish culture. This is more general world culture. I have an incredibly hot historical take about the practice of eating breakfast cereals not just breakfast cereals but the ritual and practice of eating them and this hot take

has been in my head for jeez I'd say nearly fucking six weeks but the thing is about me and a hot take is sometimes I have to let them just boil

inside me some an idea will kind of float into my head and it'll excite me like a hot take for me is when I'm doing reading and research and then an interesting story pops up it's when I'm engaged in the act of researching

and then my fiction writing brain kicks in and something just jumps out and I'm like wow there's a story in here a really interesting story that I haven't heard anyone tell before so when that happens I'm like right I know that's a hot take

but I have to leave it settle within me until I let it settle inside me until the story resolves itself. What I'm looking for is set up conflict resolution. That's a story. That's a hot take. So I have one around breakfast cereals and it's this. So here's the thesis of this episode that I'm going to try and argue for. When you sit down in the morning and you engage in the practice

of eating your breakfast cereal, okay, you take out the cereal, you pour on the milk, you reach for the spoon and you begin to eat. That act is actually an ideological battle between

two opposing Victorian sex communes. And I know that sounds fucking mad, but trust me on it, I've been researching hard on this subject and it's a very fascinating area. The origins of both the cereal that we eat in the morning and the cutlery that we used to eat it. They have very specific and bizarre roots. So first let's talk about three really common breakfast cereals that we'd eat today. Cornflakes is the obvious one. What makes cornflakes fucking special?

I think it's that they're not special. I always think of Cornflakes as like the default cereal. Like when you're in the cereal aisle in the shop, Cornflakes are like the normal cereal and then everything else is a deviation from that. Starting with Frosties, which are basically Cornflakes with sugar on them.

Then you've got Weetabix. I mean, Weetabix. I like Weetabix. Fairly straightforward. Put some milk on it. Bit of sugar if you like. Weetabix is really good at filling you up. It's like a slightly more adult version of cornflakes. And then you've got Granola, Granola's lovely who doesn't like fucking Granola

but there's three cereals there Corn Flakes, Weetabix and Granola now I'm the type of person that just for the laugh I tend to just want to find, I'm very curious I'm a very curious to find... I'm very curious.

I'm a very curious person. So if I'm eating a cereal, I kind of go, what the fuck is this? The fuck is this? Like, it's not an animal. It's not a plant. What the fuck is this?

So I'll go, I want to find out what this is and where it comes from. And a really interesting thing I found about these three specific cereals that are ubiquitous, Cornflakes, Weetabix, Granola, they all have their origins in utopian communities from the 1800s. They were invented by communities of people who were trying to improve the world. communities of people who were trying to improve the world and via capitalism they've survived to this day as things that we eat for fucking breakfast and we don't think about what does

cornflakes mean what does we the bix mean what was the person who invented granola trying to do we don't think about this they're just now products that we consume because we believe that they're healthy that's why you eat them it's like they're healthy they're healthy foods with lots of fiber and it's a good way to start the day so i'm going to begin by talking about the 1800s okay one one thing that happened culturally in the 1800s is a culture emerged of planned utopias okay what I mean by that is

quite a lot of people mainly from Europe mainly around Germany kind of took a look around at the world and in this really optimistic way said I bet you we could do better I bet you we could move we could I bet you we could move, we could all get together, maybe a hundred of us, and we could buy some land in America, or we could buy some land in South

America, and we all moved there, and we're going to start a town based on a new set of rules about how we think the world should work. it was fairly common it was very idealistic it was very optimistic you had like the the transcendentalist movement um an example would be brook farm in so in 18 when was it 1847 in massachusetts near b, a group of these transcendentalists, about 150 of them, bought a farm and tried to live out their transcendentalist utopia on this farm, where it was all collective ownership and collective sharing of profits. And they believed that, look, we've got a set of rules about how life should be, and if we follow this, everything's going to be amazing.

Or in 1843, again in Massachusetts, which is near Boston, you had another group of Transcendentalists who started a utopian community, a commune called Fruitlands. And these people were really strict vegans. But so fucking strict that they were so strict that they couldn't use any animals to pull their plows and also even planting potatoes in the ground they couldn't do it if it meant disturbing a worm so i think a few people starved in that commune and then near long island in 1851 there was a commune called modern times which was founded on the principles of

anarchy and what I'm kind of poking at there is is there was something in the air in the 1800s that there was something in the air that made people think wow um I'm confident that we can engineer society we can create an ideal society if we just figure out the rules. This really optimistic idea. And I was scratching my head a bit thinking, what the fuck's going on in the latter part of the 1800s that has people thinking like this, that they could be so optimistic as to think that they could design a new society?

What's the one reason? And there isn't really one reason. It's kind of just, that's a symptom of modernism. Now, when I say modernism, you're thinking, how could something be modern, but it's in 1840, blind boy? Well, modernism doesn't mean like right now or something that's modern. It refers to the era of modernism, which is from about 1850 to 1950 and what it is is it's it's a it's society's intellectual response intellectual and cultural response to the industrial revolution so the industrial revolution is when you you had the Industrial Revolution and then you have the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment started around the same time as the Industrial Revolution.

The Enlightenment is when Western European civilization starts to appreciate things like science once again. And the Industrial Revolution is when we start to see the emergence of modern technology that's created huge factories and shit like that and trains and steam fucking boats and all this carry on. So by 1850, humans were like, holy fuck. Also the birth of giant cities, the birth of huge cities like London, Sheffield, industrial cities. Humans kind of went, they looked around and said, wow, look at all we can do. Look at our giant

cities. Look at our huge steam engines. Look at the trains we have. Look at those hot air balloons. We humans are amazing. Look at this new science that we have to solve all these problems and create these wonderful huge machines so society started to adopt this idea of anything that's new and modern and technological is the way forward that we can change anything we want

if we put faith in science and technology. And this became an emergent theme from about 1850 onwards. And we usually say things like modernism when we're referring to artistic movements. Simple example, and I've spoken about this a million times. The Impressionist paintings of Monet. What makes the Impressionist paintings of Monet modernist? It's very simple. What happened around 1850? The camera was invented. When cameras get invented, what did that mean? Painters went, oh fuck, I'm going to be replaced by a machine. And then the modernists, the modernist painters

such as Monet, the Impressionists, said, no, I'm going to do what a camera can't. I'm going to look toward the new science of optics and understanding colour, and I'm going to paint colour in a way that a camera never can. And that's a very simple version of what Impressionist painting is. Modernism in Literature. James Joyce from Ireland. He wrote Ulysses around 1910. Why is Ulysses modernist? Because James Joyce is writing a novel and he's influenced by two things. First of all the birth of cinema. He's responding to there's a new way to tell stories by recording visual information and telling them via time in a cinema. So James Joyce starts to write books a little bit like how cinema tells stories.

And he's also responding to the new science of psychoanalysis. So a novel like Ulysses isn't just interested in the words that come out of the characters' mouths in the book. The novel is interested in the words in that character's mind before they become words that come out of their mouth. The novel is interested in the unconscious mind of the characters, which was very new, very modern, and informed by science, and also a response to the technology of cinema. Surrealist painting is modernist. Painter like Salvador Dali. Why is surrealist painting modernist?

Because Salvador Dali was going, I'm not just going to paint what I can see with my eyes. I'm going to look at the work of Sigmund Freud and try to paint my unconscious mind, I'm informed by the new science of psychology so that there is why I reckon there was a movement towards utopian communities from 1850

onwards, it was it's modernism, it's a group of people saying I'm going to design a society or a town the way that an engineer would design a fucking steam engine. I'm going to treat this scientifically and create something brand new. And also what you have there is these people who wanted to start their utopian communities, they would have been quite horrified as well, they would have been rejecting

the industrial revolution also you have to remember the industrial revolution brought about gigantic cities with huge populations that humanity hadn't seen before and within that you had people being exploited by factory owners

you had slums and you had the rise of factory owners. You had slums. And you had the rise of things like addiction in these slums. Addiction to gin and alcoholism. And the modern ills of society were birthed in this era. So some people were like, oh, we've done it wrong. We've used our advanced science and technology to create a hellish society of slums. Let's use the same technology to create a perfect society, a utopia. And breakfast cereals

were invented during this period as the food, the new food of this utopia. Specifically, cornflakes, Weetabix and granola were all invented to stop people wanking. That's not a joke. All three of them were invented to stop people masturbating. So how does something like that happen? So in the 1800s in America in particular, something emerged in culture called the clean living movement. It would have been a pure American middle class, upper class ideology. And it was a way to cleanse and purify society.

Really what it was, was it was a response. It was a response to the slums of the likes of New York. It was quite Protestant. It was racist. And it was also anti-Irish. So in like the 1850s in New York one in three people was an Irish immigrant. The people coming from Ireland were escaping famine. The people in Ireland had been through several generations of the penal laws. So Irish people were a huge population with severe intergenerational trauma, addiction problems, coming from a violent conflict-filled society and then flooding the slums of New York as the absolute bottom of society and also riddled

with diseases like cholera and typhoid because of malnutrition and the horrendous journey that they had to endure on the ship to America. So lots of these Irish lived in the infamous slums of Manhattan known as the Five Pints around then

alongside freed African American slaves from the southern states of America who would also have been considered the bottom of society and had their generational trauma and everything that goes with it. So the behaviour of the Irish in the slums of New York would have been lots of drinking, lots of fucking, lots of fighting, and not having jobs because there's no employment, not being particularly, not a lot of personal hygiene, murder, a lot of infant deaths.

Everything horrible you can imagine happening to a population in a slum was happening to the Irish at this point. And this manifested itself into the Protestant middle upper class American mindset as this moral panic, this fear. This fear of this all being like a punishment from God. That basically a belief that the Irish are filthy, poor, violent drinkers who have loads of children and have loads of sex and have horrible lives. They are this way because they choose to be this way. And because they can't stop drinking and they can't stop fucking each other, God is punishing them daily with the misery of their existence. other, God is punishing them daily with the misery of their existence. So we as white Anglo-Saxon Protestants must distance ourselves in every way possible from these filthy, dirty Irish. So we must not smoke tobacco, not drink alcohol. We must keep our bodies cleansed. We must not masturbate. We must not not any possible pleasure of the flesh

we can't give into it because as soon as we do we're going to be filthy crawling around the gutter like those Irish and those black people in the five-point slums of Manhattan so where does cornflakes getting invented as a way to stop people masturbating tie into this well so this clean living movement that I mentioned there, which was a cultural phenomenon of we must abstain from all pleasures of the flesh in order to not become

like these Irish. Also what gets tied into this around the same time is religious ideology. So there was a Baptist preacher from New York called William Miller, Protestant Baptist preacher. And he would have kind of just taken a look around and taken a look at the likes of the slums of New York that I just mentioned and just said, oh my God,

the world is going to end. This is so, there's so much sin. This is like Sodom and Gomorrah. Christ is going to come and cleanse this place with fire and the only people that will be left will be the righteous and he's going to burn all the sinners and he became fixated on this idea and he said christ is going to come in 1844 1844 christ is coming and he's going to fucking cleanse this place with fire. So William Miller gained all these followers called Millerites who were waiting going, whoa, 1844, the fires are going to come, they're going to cleanse the earth, we're going to be left. And then it didn't happen.

And this became known as the Great Disappointment. And it became known as the Great Disappointment because a lot of Miller's followers, his religious followers, were disappointed. They genuinely wanted to see the earth cleansed with fire. So they were left with a dilemma. And they said to themselves, OK, maybe Christ isn't going to come next week or the week after that and cleanse the whole place with fire. Maybe he's not going to do that.

So what we got to do is if he does come, we got to make sure that we are just perfectly clean. That when Christ does come, let's not set any dates anymore. But when he does come, our job is to make sure that we're perfectly ready to be saved when he does come. And these people became known as Seventh-day Adventists. And these Seventh-day Adventists borrowed heavily from the clean living movement. So what they did basically is they took extreme apocalyptic Christianity and mixed it with we're going to be vegetarians. We're not going to have any pleasure in our body. There'll be no excessive sex. There'll be no masturbation. We're going to make sure that we eat healthily all the

time. We're going to be, we won't smoke. There'll be no alcohol. There'll be no masturbation we're going to make sure that we eat healthily all the time we're going to be we won't smoke there'll be no alcohol there'll be nothing the seventh day adventists didn't believe in heaven they believed that their bodies are as they are right now on earth so in order for them to be pure for god they have to have their bodies physically fucking pure as healthy as possible think of your friend now today who's obsessed with only eating organic food and whole foods. Imagine that, but they mixed it with hardcore apocalyptic Christianity. That's what the Seventh-day Adventists were. And two of these Seventh-day Adventists were John Harvey Kellogg and Will Keith Kellogg.

Kellogg, Kellogg's Corn Flakes, Kellogg's the fucking cereal. So John Harvey Kellogg and Will Keith Kellogg. Kellogg, Kellogg's Corn Flakes, Kellogg's the fucking cereal. So John Harvey Kellogg was a doctor. He was also a pure through and through modernist. He believed in eugenics. Eugenics is the idea that you clean society of what you perceive to be defective genes. What the Nazis did is eugenics. Ethnic cleansing is eugenics. John Harvey Kellogg believed that people who were poor

just should die. People who were of a different race should die. They shouldn't have the opportunity to procreate. That he believed that society, as a modernist, society had a responsibility to remove what he saw as defective genes from society and that if you did this then you'd have a scientific solution

and there'd be no more alcoholism no more poverty, no more criminality no more sexual promiscuity no more feeble mindedness as he called it basically he was a big rich boy who would go past the five-point slums

and see a load of fucking Irish people or see some black people and go, those people are poor or violent or having too much sex and it's because of how they're born and they need to be removed from society. They shouldn't procreate. That's what he believed. So an absolute fucking bollocks and then on top of that if you if he deemed that your genes

were worthy of society and you were pure then you had a responsibility through complete clean living to treat your body like a temple you don't drink you don't smoke you don't eat meat you don't fucking have tea you don't have coffee you don't have excessive sex you don't masturbate you try your very best to not do anything enjoyable or bring any pleasure into your body whatsoever because to do so would be sinful and and distances you from god john John Harvey Kellogg was obsessed with how evil masturbation was. Obsessed. He believed that once you started masturbating, that's when the slippery slope happens and you end up in the gutter. That's when you end up with diseases. That's when you end up with alcoholism. You become a criminal if you masturbate.

So he was on a crusade to end masturbation. And he believed the best way to stop masturbation is if you don't eat or drink anything that's remotely tasty. That basically if you eat food that's too pleasurable, the pleasure and excitement of tasting something nice that's enough to make you want to start wanking and then once you start wanking you're going to be stabbing someone down an alleyway so him and his brother right so the two kellogg brothers john and will they went to michigan and they founded uh an ad Day Adventist, which was their religion

the Seventh Day Adventist Sanitarium right, in a place called Battle Creek and basically what this was is that it was like a health spa so if you were one of these people, if you were a middle class white Anglo-Saxon Protestant basically you would visit

Kellogg's health spa and he would give you any number of utterly fucking ridiculous treatments so that your body could become purified so that you wouldn't give in to the sins of the flesh you would become a pure healthy living person now John and Keith Kellogg had strong opinions about breakfast because it's how you start the day and in the sanatorium they were trying to develop a type of breakfast that would definitely make someone not wank.

So the first thing they developed was, it was a breakfast that you don't eat it. What they did was, they got their patient and they pumped three litres of yoghurt up their anus. I'm not taking the piss. The Kellogg brothers decided to pump yoghurt up people's arseholes for breakfast. Now this didn't have the effect of making people not masturbate. It actually made some people want to masturbate because they found that when they pumped all that yoghurt up someone's arse for breakfast it stimulated the prostate and people were getting erections so they moved away from

that thank fuck so the legacy of kellogg's is not three liters of yogurt up your arse in the morning they moved away from that and then they invented granola they invented fucking granola which we still eat today quite lovely delicious granola i enjoy granola but they invented granola, which we still eat today. Quite lovely, delicious granola. I enjoy granola, but they invented granola as a way to, if you eat this, you will not masturbate, you will not foul yourself, besmirch yourself if you eat the granola. And then the next big breakthrough they had in 1898, they made cornflakes. they had in 1898 they made cornflakes William Kellogg and John Harvey Kellogg

invented fucking cornflakes in this sanatorium specifically as what is the most bland food that we can make that will no way stimulate the body so you definitely won't masturbate that's what Kellogg's

fucking cornflakes are. Literally, to a T, this pair of fucking lunatics who were pumping yogurt up people's arses invented cornflakes so people wouldn't wank. Informed by a deep, unconscious fear of Irish people. So then what happened? When they developed these cornflakes

and originally they were sending them out via mail, they became really popular. People were ordering the cornflakes and they're like. They'd be like ordering the cornflakes going yum yum this is nice. And then John would ring you up and go did you not wank? And the person's like wank? I just like the breakfast cereal it's really nice. Yeah yeah but did you not wank? I don like the breakfast cereal. It's really nice. Yeah, yeah, but did you not wank? I don't know about wanking.

It's just really tasty. And they'd invented this thing that people didn't care that this was an anti-masturbation food. They're like, this is just a lovely, delicious, simple way to start the morning. And I can store it easily in the cupboard. It's lovely. I put a bit of milk on it. I'm

sorted. Can I have more cornflakes, please? And John Kellogg was getting a bit pissed off because he's like, I don't give a fuck of these. I don't want these people enjoying this. I want them not wanking. But then his brother William was a bit more of a capitalist. Now, William Kellogg was like, I kind of want to become a multi-millionaire through these fucking cornflakes here. I don't give a shit whether they make people wank or not. So John Harvey Kellogg and William Kellogg ended up fought on out with each other

because John Harvey Kellogg he was straight up religious. He's like I want to change America. I want to save America from the fires of fucking hell. I want people to stop masturbating so they don't become Irish. All right? And then William was like, no, I want to become a millionaire and sell a bunch of cornflakes to whoever the fuck will eat them.

Capitalism won. So William basically said, my brother's a lunatic. So I'm going to create my own company called the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company and I'm gonna make these corn flakes and I'm just gonna sell them because they're yummy for breakfast that's what I'm gonna do so he did and they became hugely popular and then he legally took ownership of the Kellogg's name and this is what makes Kellogg's Corn Flakes so interesting to me And this is what makes Kellogg's Corn Flakes so interesting to me today. This is what makes Kellogg's Corn Flakes that you're going to eat for your breakfast.

This is what makes them post-modern. So John Kellogg, he was being a modernist. He was straight up going, society is fucked. So I'm going to take the grand narrative the dual grand narratives of science and religion and I'm going to create a food an anti-masturbating food to fix society that's the modernist vision of John Kellogg and it failed because his brother just went with pure capitalism his brother rejected that modernism his brother straight up went post-modernism. I don't want to change anything.

I don't give a fuck. I just want to make money. Everything's meaningless. Me, me, me. I want to make money with my orange flakes. Fuck you. And capitalism won. Because when I say Kellogg's Corn Flakes

to you, what do you think of? you just go that default cereal that default cereal that's the most cereal of all cereals you don't think these were purposely designed

with science and religion in mind to be so bland that I don't masturbate. You don't think that so much that even after listening to this podcast you probably don't believe me because it's the maddest fact in the world. But it's true. Capitalism 1. Kellogg's are post-modern. They're a post-modern foodstuff. They rejected the grand narrative of science and religion to become just cynical capitalist wank flakes. And what about Weetabix? I mentioned Weetabix. Well Weetabix interestingly were also invented independently by a Seventh-day Adventist. So in Australia and New Zealand,

there were seventh day Adventists. These lads who were the same religion as the Kelloggs, into the same shit. And they invented Weetabix as an incredibly boring breakfast to make you stop wanking. And this was invented in Australia and New Zealand. And to this day,

in Australia and New Zealand, when you buy day, in Australia and New Zealand, when you buy Weetabix, it's called Weetbix. And the company that own Weetbix today are the Sanitarium Health and Wellbeing Company, which is a company owned by the Seventh-day Adventist Church. So our three cornerstones of breakfast cereals there, granola, cornflakes and weedabix were all invented by the adventist movement to create a utopian society where we never masturbate and then don't become degenerate irish criminals and that's part one of my hot take because I said my hot take here around the breakfast

cereal is that when you when you eat your breakfast cereal in the morning the act of eating it it's an ideological battle between two opposing Victorian sex communes so just after the ocarina

pause I'm going to tell you the part two here's the ocarina pause, I'm going to tell you the part two. Here's the ocarina pause. Rock city. You're the best fans in the league. Bar none. Tickets are on sale now for fan appreciation night on Saturday, April 13th. When the Toronto rock hosts the Rochester Nighthawks

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So, back to the hot take. It's 2021 again. And it's breakfast time. And you are sitting down to eat your bowl of Kellogg's Corn Flakes with milk. And you take out your spoon. And I said this podcast is about proving to you that the act of eating your cereal is an ideological battle between two separate Victorian sex fucking communes. So it's fair to the Battle Creek Sanatorium that John Kellogg set up

that was his utopian vision of a perfect society and it was sex based. Alright? He was anti-sex but he was fucking obsessed with it. He was anti-sex. But he was fucking obsessed with it. He was shoving yogurts up people's arses.

And he was feeding them cornflakes so they wouldn't wank. Alright. So that to me is a sex commune. Because even though he's trying to get people to have none of it. The Kelloggs were still both fucking obsessed with it. The other thing that's involved in eating your breakfast. Is the cutlery that you use. Let's now investigate.

The Victorian sex commune. Origins. Of your cutlery. That you use to eat your anti-wang flakes. So I started the episode by speaking about. Modernism. And utopian communes and how utopian communes became this really big thing in the 1800s.

And there were loads of different types of communes and different types of ideologies and attempts at creating small little perfect societies in America and South America and places like that. So in 1848 in upstate New York right this fella called John Humphrey Noyes and 87 other people formed a commune which was Christian but like the exact opposite of what the Kelloggs believed in or the opposite of what the Seventh-day Adventists believed in. So the community was called the Oneida community. It was again an attempt at a utopian society. An attempt at we're going to create our own

little society we're going to come up with rules and this is going to fix the ills of society. They believed that it was a combination of Christianity, Communism and loads of riding. So the Oneida community, the Oneida community completely abolished all ownership of property. So all members of the commune worked but nobody owned anything. Everything was shared. Also everyone was married to each other. It was a system known as complex marriage. Everybody was married to each other and everyone had sex with each other. Now this wasn't polygamy where you might have one man and several wives. This was complete equality.

Everyone was married to one another. Nobody owned property of any description and people were expected to have sex with everyone they were married to, which is everyone. And the thing is, as a result, so with this Anida community as a result of abolishing property and abolishing kind of patriarchal marriage as such for the time the women in the anida community had way more kind of rights than women would have had outside the community. They had access

to work, access to education, they had access to the exact same jobs and education as the men. They had the right to accept or reject sex from whoever it was. They were expected to enjoy the sex that they were having. They were expected to have sex, not just to procreate, but to have sex for the enjoyment of having sex because this is spiritually a good thing. Because everyone was having so much sex, family planning was a huge part of the society of the Oneida community. So women weren't expected to have children. They were allowed to have sex if they enjoyed having sex

and if they wanted to have a child, they could choose to have a child with whoever, whatever partner that was. Because of the family planning methods that they were using, there was no contraception. Men were expected to become experts at not ejaculating and therefore lasting longer and attending to the pleasure of

the women this is the fucking 1840s the men were also encouraged to masturbate by themselves if they wanted to so the thing with the oneida community is they were a christian sect known as perfectionism which was a christian sect that believed that the responsibility of humans is to achieve communion with God in this life. But the Oneida community believed that the best way to achieve communion with God is to achieve sexual communion with each other. They were kind of going, if sex is so amazing, then surely God created this thing as something we should be doing, rather than something we're supposed to be avoiding, because it's sinful. Unlike the fucking, the Kelloggs and their Seventh-day Adventists, who believed that sex was a sin, or masturbation was a sin, led to even more sins or punishment.

One of the biggest issues that the Oneida community had was the complex marriage right. So because everyone was married to everybody monogamy was considered they called it selfish love. So if you were to just want to be with one person within the commune and have exclusivity that was frowned upon that was seen as taken property and they found that this was a huge issue especially amongst the younger members people were just falling in love with each other and wanting to become monogamous and not wanting to have sex with other people and it was a big issue so because of this because of this being a huge problem,

continually having to fight what they believe to be the selfishness of humanity, every week they used to have these group therapy sessions called mutual criticism. And there's a written description of what one of these sessions was like. This system takes the place of backbiting in ordinary society and is regarded as one of the greatest means of improvement and fellowship this ordinance is far from agreeable to those with egotism and vanity it's an ordeal which reveals insincerity and selfishness but it also often takes the form of commendation and reveals hidden virtues as well as secret faults it is always

acceptable to those who wish to see themselves as others see them so the anida community there they used to have these mutual group sessions where people would try and eradicate themselves from ego and ownership individualism and to see themselves as part of a whole and to see themselves as being valued within that whole and it's now viewed as, literally viewed as an early form of group therapy that's how people look back on what the

Inuit community were doing, but the Inuit community, they were consistently attempts were made to run them out of town several times because the people outside of the community were like, what do you mean they're all fucking each other? Like, this is Victorian times. People outside of the walls were all about their sexual shame

and punishment and sin. They couldn't handle this complex marriage that was going on in the community. But the Anoida community then made a point of opening up the gates of the place and allowing the locals to come in and to see that they're actually nice people they're not what the community think they are the boogeymen that they have in their heads and then what would happen some members of the public would actually end up joining the community so the community grew quite large so So it started in 1848. And by 1878, there was... It started with 87 members.

By 1878, it had 300 members. So that's 30 years later. So here's the mad thing that happens with the Oneida Utopian community. So they're operating fantastically as this communal ownership no property everyone's married to everyone they're getting on really well and then they start figuring out how to earn money because they need to earn money to keep the commune going they tried to start a little farm that doesn't work and then they find what they're really good at is industrial production so they began to make cutlery but here's

the interesting thing because they faced the challenges of trying to get 300 people to be married to each other and trying to eradicate monogamy and trying to eradicate selfishness and trying to get people to be okay with collective ownership that meant running a really tight ship based on communication compassion and listening so all of these skills that they'd use to make sure everyone fucks each other actually turned out to be ridiculously efficient when it came to running a business so they not only became good at making cutlery they became insanely good at making cutlery and the commune became filthy rich but all this wealth was shared amongst each other so then what happened so now you have this thriving commune based around collective ownership, based around fucking everyone married to each other and everyone making cutlery really efficiently,

happy with their jobs, no one being selfish because everyone owns everything and mad efficient. They'd achieved their utopia essentially. But what starts to happen is it gets 30, 40 years into the commune and now children are being born. And what they found was is that

the children of the people in the initial commune, they rejected the values of their parents. They didn't want this fucking communal marriage thing. They wanted monogamy they wanted to reject their parents values also something that the younger members of the commune had a serious issue with is one of the rules within the Oneida community was the youngest members had to have sex with the oldest members so if you were coming of age sexually, you were expected to have sex with whatever member of the opposite sex was the oldest person in the commune. And they would teach you

how to have sex. And this was going on regardless of gender. So a lot of the younger members were like, I don't want to do that. I'm not into that. Then as well the police started getting interested in this type of carry on and John Noyes the founder of the Oneida community in his later years he gets arrested for statutory rape and he flees to Canada and he tries to give the

Oneida community to his son nepotism. Not only is that nepotism, that's straight up patriarchy. That's a man passing something down to his son that's patriarchy that's everything the community is trying to go against they want equality free love they don't want any ownership no ownership of property or any leadership to even pass down so your man noise has broken the golden rule there so that causes a split and one a founding member of the community john tower says fuck that who's with me let's leave here

and start a new commune somewhere else so a bunch of members leave and john tower goes to california where he convinces the government to create a new town for him and that town is called orange county so when you think of orange county in california which is now fucking huge and has a city there that was founded for these fucking sex people it was founded for them and that uh the oneida community that went to orange county a lot of because remember remember i said they coined the phrase free love, a lot of the hippie movement and the liberalism that's associated with California, some of it is credited to this community that moved there to Orange County. Why else in the 60s did they start talking about free love? It was brought there by these mad cunts so back to new york to the

original community right so things aren't going so well here's a big issue it's now like 40 years after the community was founded right which means a huge amount of the original members are now elderly and dying and then you have all these younger members that were born in the community who are now young adults one of the problematic issues of the fucking anida community is that one of the rules is everyone has to fuck everyone so if you're a young person you're expected to have sex with the oldest person there so they can teach you how to have sex but there was these big debates going on about how young is too young and then the leader of the fucking community john noise he gets arrested for statutory rape so the community falls to bits and then you're left with all these younger young

adults and they basically agree agree with each other and they say I don't really like this collective sex business that our parents were into but I kind of like the cutlery side of stuff we're pretty good at making cutlery yeah so in 1881 the Oneida utopian community sex commune community dissolves and it becomes a corporation Oneida Limited one of the most successful cutlery

manufacturers in the world ever, they're still around today so what started as a Christian sex commune in 1848 is now one of the largest cutlery manufacturers in the world. And not only are they one of the largest cutlery manufacturers in the world, and here's what's even madder.

So, Anoida Limited, they got rid of all the marriage and the collective ownership and that shit, and just became a corporation that makes and sells and manufactures cutlery. But because of the early culture in the utopian commune the early culture where they were trying to maintain this complex marriage and they were trying to stop people being monogamous with each other so they had these these meetings where they'd hold each other to account and there was open communication. They held on to that and that's what made the company flourish. But they're considered to be highly influential on modern American corporate culture.

So the American concept of team meetings and stuff like this, that culture can be traced back to this mad Christian sex commune that became a highly successful cutlery company Oneida Limited they're still around today, they mass produce cutlery all over the world that's where I go back to my initial hot take there's a good

chance that if you've ever picked up a knife or a fork or a spoon, that this was made by the Oneida Cutlery Company or someone involved with them because they're fucking huge all around the world so when you sit down to eat your breakfast in the

morning, your cornflakes or your Weetabix or your granola, your cereal was brought about by a Victorian sex commune who fucking hated sex, who hated sex so much that they wanted to stop masturbating. And then the cutlery that you used to eat that cereal, the wide scale industrial mass production of it was made possible by a Victorian

sex commune who just wanted to fuck each other all the time so you have two completely opposed Christian ideologies around sex absolutely intertwined into the history of your bowl of cornflakes and the great irony of it all those are both modernist dreams whether it be the Kellogg company thinking that they can purify society

by abstaining from sex or the Oneida company thinking they can purify themselves or purify society by having loads of sex each one failed due to the cynicism of capitalism I just want to sell

cereal and cutlery and I don't give a fuck what any of it means and I don't want to sell cereal and cutlery. And I don't give a fuck what any of it means. And I don't want to change society. Because society is unchangeable. I just want to make money. I don't care. I'm a cynic. And that there is pure postmodernism.

I hope you enjoyed that. I certainly enjoyed thinking about it for the past two fucking months. Because it was blowing my mind. I don't know what I'll be back with next week. I did that podcast this week because there was a few blind boy podcasts, purists, complaining about the last few podcasts that the subject matter, that it was too low-hanging fruit.

Link's Africa, chicken fillet rolls, that type of shit. The fruit is totally low hanging, which I disagree with. Yes, it is low hanging fruit. Doing a podcast about chicken fillet rolls or fucking Lynx Africa and teenage discos, that's low hanging fruit.

But just because it's low hanging fruit doesn't mean I have to dissect it or address it in that fashion. I still enjoy doing those podcasts, but the purists wanted something a bit more off the wall or odd. So there you go. Gotta keep everyone

happy. Dog bless. Rock City, you're the best fans in the league bar none tickets are on sale now for fan appreciation night on saturday april 13th when the toronto rock hosts the rochester nighthawks at first ontario center in hamilton at 7 30 p.m you can also lock in your playoff pack right now to guarantee the same seats for every postseason game, and you'll only pay as we play. Come along for the ride and punch your ticket to Rock City at torontorock.com. Thank you.