You're Dead to Me - Kellogg Brothers (Radio Edit)

Episode Date: November 21, 2025

Greg Jenner is joined in 19th-century America by historian Dr Vanessa Heggie and comedian Ed Byrne to learn all about the feuding Kellogg Brothers.John and Will Kellogg were born into a large family in Battle Creek, Michigan, in the middle of the 1800s. Following a childhood marred by illness and death, John earned a medical degree before returning to run the Sanitorium – a health and wellness centre – in his hometown, where he prescribed a variety of treatments both sensible and surreal, including a vegetarian diet, fresh air and exercise, hydrotherapy, and regular enemas! He was soon joined in his wellness venture by his business-minded brother Will, and together they invented a breakfast cereal we still know and love today: cornflakes. But after years of John’s bullying, Will left to launch his own business: the Kellogg company.This episode tells the story of these battling brothers and their food and wellness business ventures, exploring everything from their sibling relationship and the competing stories they tell about the invention of their most famous cereal, to John’s Seventh Day Adventist beliefs and his pioneering wife with her meat-free meal replacements.This is a radio edit of the original podcast episode. For the full-length version, please look further back in the feed.Hosted by: Greg Jenner Research by: Charlotte Emily Edgeshaw Written by: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow, Emma Nagouse, and Greg Jenner Produced by: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow and Greg Jenner Audio Producer: Steve Hankey Production Coordinator: Gill Huggett Senior Producer: Emma Nagouse Executive Editor: Philip Sellars

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. I'm Julie Andrews, and it is my great pleasure to bring you Jane Austen Stories, the new show from the Noiser Podcast Network. I'll be reading Pride and Prejudice. We'll walk grand estates and take tea with well-dressed gentlewomen, but in this tranquil corner of England, not everything is quite. as it appears. Listen to Jane Austen stories wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously.

My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster. And today we are grabbing our spoons and tucking into a big old bowl of cereal as we sauntered back to 19th century America to learn all about the Kellogg Brothers. And to help us, we have two very special Breakfast Buddies. In History Corner, she's Associate Professor in the History of Science and Medicine at the University of Birmingham's Department of Applied Health Science. You may have read her excellent book, Higher and Colder, on the History of Extreme Exploration, and you'll definitely remember her from our episodes on Victorian Bodybuilding and the Northwest Passage. That's not one episode. It'll be weird if it was. It's Dr Vanessa Heggy. Welcome

back, Vanessa. It's great to be back. And in Comedy Corner, he's a comedian, actor and writer. You will know him from loads of television programs, including Mock the Week, QI, have a got news for you, and live at the Apollo. Plus, he's a staple of BBC Radio for shows like The Unbelievable Truth, The News Quiz and The Infinite Monkey Cage. Maybe you've seen one of his amazing live tour shows, including the award-winning tragedy plus time.

That's right, it's Ed Byrne. Welcome to the show, Ed. Thank you very much indeed. I feel like I shouldn't even be here when I had toast for practice. Ed, your first time on the show, we're delighted to have you in. First question I have to ask, contractually obligated.

Are you a history fan, lover, admir it? Did he like it at school? Do you partake? Yeah, I mean, history at school, it's interesting. Like, as an Irish person, I have massive gaps in what I'm expected to know living in England. Like, anything to do with the British monarchy that people here just take for granted as knowing. I'm just absolutely out in the cold on. And I have no notion of who came where.

I mean, having numbers in the king's names helps. That even having lived now in Britain since the age of 18, I'm determined to keep it as a black. spot in my knowledge. Well, today we're talking about America, so you don't have to do any royal stuff. What do you know about breakfast cereal? Have you ever been a breakfast cereal guy? Yeah, totally.

No, absolutely. And it's one of those ones where if I have even an ordinary breakfast cereal like crunching no cornflags, I pat myself on the back for not having a cinnamon swirl. I do feel quite good about myself if I haven't had a friend.

or basically cake. So, what do you know? This is the so what do you know? This is where I have a go at guessing what you are a lovely listener might know about today's subject. And I think, like Ed, most of you are familiar with the Kellogg's brand. If you eat cereal, like Ed, you're going to recognize their various popular products. They're their mascots that go with them, including Snap, Crackle and Pop.

And the iconic Tony the Tiger, he's fine, he's fine. But I'm guessing the history of the Kellogg family specifically might be less familiar unless you are a serial, serial botherer or you've seen the 1994 movie, The Road to Wellville, starring Anthony Hopkins. So how did a family feud lead to the creation of such an iconic company?

What wellness fads were popular in the late 19th century and what has yoghurt got to do with it? Let's find out. What's yogurt got to do with it? The Tina Turner classic that never was. Dr Vanessa, let's start with the basics then. Who were the Kellogg family? And we've talked about the Kellogg's brothers.

Which brothers? So the two brothers we're talking about are John Harvey Kellogg, who was born on the 26th of February 1852, and his younger brother, Will Keith Kellogg, born on the 7th of April 1860. But they are part of a large family. Their dad, John Preston Kellogg, had five children with his first wife, Mary Ann,

and then 11 with his second wife, Anne Stanley. So John and Will are numbers. 10 and 14 for John Preston out of his total of 16 kids. This is back in the day when you used to shoot out of like kids. Especially with two marriages. You were going to lose a couple anyway somewhere in the shop. Spoilers, that's coming up. Yeah.

Okay. So when John was born in 1852, the family are still trying to make it as farmers in Michigan. But shortly after his birth, they sold the farm. They bought a broom factory. And then in 1856, they moved with their new business to Battle Creek, a small town, which is where Will's born. And while John Harvey is charming and sociable, Will is not those things. He is not as outgoing. His family definitely thought he wasn't as smart as his older brother, John.

And the brothers do not have a good relationship. John physically and verbally bullied his younger brother, and he used his storytelling ability to get Will in trouble by telling tales on him when he'd done something wrong. Tragedy struck many times. Mary Ann Kellogg, John Prescott's first wife dies of tuberculosis in 1841, and amongst the siblings, the direct siblings of John and Will, four of the 11 of them die, three of them in infancy

and one of them is in their early teenage years. And even for those that survive, this is a childhood that's marked out by sickness. John Harvey is a boy. He claimed he had TB that he said lost his use of a lung. Yes, apparently he caught tuberculosis and it made basically one of his lungs, his left lung, completely non-functional for the rest of his life. And it certainly wasn't the only one of his diseases,

I think perhaps more important to his later life. really suffered from digestive disorders. He developed colitis. And so he turned to religion. It's not the sort of classic American Baptist or Lutheran. It's something called the Seventh-day Adventist. Yeah. And religion was a huge part of the Kellogg family life. John Harvey's dad, John Preston, there's a lot of familiar names here, so we're going to try and keep them apart. So John Preston was really... Mr. Kellogg. Mr. Kellogg, Mr. Kellogg Sr. was close to the spiritual leaders of the Adventists, and that's Ellen and James White. Ellen is the person. person who's really important to shaping the faith because she's regarded as a prophetess,

so she has visions that are basically the principles of Adventism. One of those is that the second coming is coming really soon, but the other is how to live a virtuous and healthy life, which is dietary advice, exercise advice, a diet of grains and vegetables, it's vegetarianism, it's no stimulating foods, nothing spicy, nothing fried, nothing pickled, no alcohol, no drugs, but also no wigs, no corsets, no tight dresses. That's Saturday night. You're not supposed to eat those anyway. I never eat it. You've never eaten a course, Ed.

You haven't lived. Delicious. Find the very binding. All right. So John Harvey, as a sort of young boy growing into adolescence, he believed that these indulgences, they would lead to what particular indulgence, Ed? Oh, and now it's self-pleasure, no?

It is, yeah, very good. I mean, eventually all roads lead there. Vanessa, how did Ellen White's spiritual beliefs and her visions influence little John Harvey Kellogg? His relationship with the Adventist Church and the faith does have its highs and lows over the rest of his life. He doesn't always stick entirely to her spiritual rules. But he definitely absorbs a lot of these ideas about pure, simple living. What about formal education? We haven't really heard about, like, school.

Kellogg, senior, were not that keen on sending their children to school, and that's partly because if you think the second coming is coming, there's not much point sending your kids to school. But they did get persuaded to school. send both of them. John starts attending at the age of 10. He's immediately identified as this gifted child. He starts to pursue a career in education, but Ellen White had a very different plan for him. And in 1872, she persuades him to go and pays for him to go and study medicine at Charles Hygeotherapeutic College. This is a college that we would probably today say is

teaching alternative medicine, so hydrotherapy and things like that. So John Harvey attended Dr. Traul's Hygea therapy, but he then has formal training later as well. He was not very impressed with the education he got from Dr. Trial. He thought it was a bit of a waste of time and a bit of a, he calls it a bogus diploma and he doesn't ever sort of mention it when he talks about his certificates later on. But he manages to persuade the whites to continue funding his education. He actually goes and takes some courses in medicine at the university of Michigan. And then he manages to go to Bellevue Medical Hospital all the way out in New York City. And that's where he's taking as many classes in medicine, but also in medical science as he can possibly manage. Okay. So he's classically trained as a doctor. Yes, he's alternatively trained. He's technically seen both sides. So Vanessa, while John Harvey Kellogg is off at med school, little Will is doing what? He's not treated as the brightest kid, but they do still send him to school. They still think it's a waste of time and probably even more for him because he does not do so well academically.

Although I think, to be fair, that might be because he's struggling having to go to school with also having a job. So from the age of six, he's working in his parents' broom factory. Oh my word. And by 12, he's so good at it that he's become a factory-for supervisor for a team of other boys working on brooms. Yeah, but at the end of the day, NEPO baby. That's the problem with the broom industry.

I've always said it. It's sewn up, it is. Well, he may have been better than his dad, actually. 14, they've got him out on the road selling stuff, and that's really where Will blooms. He is an excellent salesman, but he's also really good at the numbers and are good at the maths

and good at the business studies and the logistics. So he manages to get to go to Parsons Business College in Kalamazoo, also in Michigan. And this is in 1880, and he therefore qualifies as a bookkeeper and an accountant, so business studies, basically. Let's get back to John. What did he do with his business?

fresh out of the cereal box medical degree. Did he go and practice medicine? So after his studies, he goes back to Battle Creek and this is what Ellen and James White had planned for him all along. They get him to run their Western Health Reform Institute because it's struggling. That's why they sent him to study medicine in the first place. He reorganises it, he reinvents it, he focuses on what he considers a healthy diet as well as the hydrotherapy they were already doing. In 1877, he renames it the Battle Creek Sanatorium. I'm saying sanatorium, not sanitarium, because he wanted to distinguish it from the other institutes, but it quickly becomes nicknamed the San to save any effort. And it thrives. And by 1880,

he needs a new manager. And so he turns an officer job to his brother, Will. So John and Will are now working together at the Battle Creek Sanatorium, nicknamed the San. Will is in charge of the bookkeeping. He's the accountant. And John is in charge of the patients, I guess, their health stuff. He's the doctor. To the brothers now get on, they're now both in their 20s or 30s, I guess. No, things are still really bad between the two brothers. Will had to work at the San for seven years, doing 18-hour days, including working Christmas before he was allowed to take two weeks off for vacation.

He's paid really badly, and that's partly because the San is associated still with the church, so a lot of people are working voluntarily or for low wages because it's church work. How well is John doing out of it at this point? Well, John technically isn't paying himself out of the San. He is paying himself out the publications he's putting out, and Will is running his publication companies. That's the other side of the business that they're also working on. He's a health author. He's kind of putting out pamphlets and so. I mean, I don't, you can't know everything. Why is William doing this? William sounds like

he's a very qualified business person. Why has he gone to work for no money with the brother that he hates him? It's harder to know because it's harder to get access to Will's personal papers than it is John Kellogg who wrote a lot of his stuff down. The guess would be that it's still family loyalty and also possibly post-traumatic stress from being bullied. But this is what he's used to. This is the relationship he's used to. It's sad, didn't it? Let's talk about the treatments you could receive at the San. By 1900, this is an incredibly large institution. It has about 700 patients. It has 1,000 staff. It has 400 acres of farmland. It has luxurious suites of patient wings. This is full modern plumbing. It's electric lighting, all of that sort of stuff. It also

has a full hospital operating theatre, scientific analysis laboratory. It has an orchestra. It has regular choir evenings for entertainment. You've got to have an orchestra. You've got to have an orchestra. There's all the baths, there's the light baths, there's massive dining rooms, there is a full experimental kitchen and that's because the real focus here is on the diet.

So it's being run on the Saturday Adventist principles, so that is vegetarian diet, vigorous exercise, no drugs, no alcohol, no tobacco, no tight corsets, no sex. And what John thinks is really important is that the food mustn't stagnate and stige. You mustn't have rotting food in your body, it has to pass through really

quickly. So you eat this particular diet. And yet spices weren't allowed. Yeah. Yeah. That would have been easier. Yeah, definitely. It's an accelerant. Yeah. So. Yoga enemas. If it doesn't come out fast enough, aim for four bowel movements a day. And if all else fails, vibration to...

Vibration. And chew your food 40 times. Is it Fletcherism, this thing? Yes. So that's named after the health guru, Horace Fletcher. So you have to chew your food, each bite of food at least 40 times to sort of predigest it before it gets into your stomach. Right. Shoot straight through. Ed, would you have voluntarily gone to one of these health farms? No, I'm a nightmare just even thinking about it.

And I'm not, you know, this is going to go out in the morning on Radio 4. I'm not going to go into detail on the thing that really puts me off at the most. But, yeah, a vegetarian diet. No, thank you. I mean, some of this is kind of sensible science. And exercise, diet, whatever, good. And some of this is bonkers stuff. We have to obviously talk about John Harvey Kellogg's pretty,

nasty views, which are fairly typical of the era, but he was particularly keen on eugenics, and he went further than some. Yeah, he was a supporter of eugenics, and this can seem confusing to some people, because obviously he is also advocating all these lifestyle diet, the nurture side of nature and nurture changes, and also because the San itself could look like quite a racially progressive institution. There's no real racial segregation there. He had some very high-profile clients, including the abolitionist, Sajuner Truth,

but he also had African-American nurses and doctors working and training them. but he also believed in the supremacy of the white race and he thought that we should be tactically breeding better men and women and these are his words like horses, cows and pigs. So he organises and hosts a series of national conferences on race betterment at the sand. The first of these is in 1913. And he's a strong advocate of what we call positive eugenics, but that's where you try and encourage some people to have more kids,

but also supported negative eugenics, which is where you try and stop people from having children. Are you going to come to me now from my hilarious take on that? Yeah, Ed, if you could just follow that up with a hilarious banger, that'll be great. I mean, obviously, it's, you know, there's an awful lot of eugenicists in this time of history. Some of them quite progressive in other ways. So we're talking about food innovators in several ways, which means we need to talk about the breakfast cereal market. Because so far, we haven't really talked about breakfast.

And that's why we're here. We're here for breakfast. How, why did the brothers break into the cereal market? So they have an experimental kitchen at the San, which, is really useful for them. And John's story, and we have to again take it with a pinch of salt, is that when he's at medical school in New York... Is the pinch of salt allowed? No, no, actually. A sprinkling of... A sprinkling of oats. Yeah. I know what can add. I don't think we're going to popularise that as a new phrase. He's taken with a sprinkling of oats. So John's story about why you got into

cereals was that he's looking for no-cook breakfast, basically. He is not the only one. There are a lot of doctors and entrepreneurs who are all trying to think about this same sort of easy breakfast morning product that's also healthy and made of grains and things like that. His key inspiration is probably granular and granular is this baked whole wheat flour crispy bits that have to be soaked overnight to become edible. So they're not really quick cook. So John and Will are kind of experimenting with different sorts of flowers and grains to try and make an easier version of this. And eventually they have this mix of wheat and oat and corn. They bake at high temperatures, they crumble it up. It still needs soaking for a couple of hours, so it's not immediate, but it's still slightly

better. Still less hassle than chia seeds. So how do we get corn flakes? Because I know there are multiple stories of how they come up with it. Okay, so the key step for cornflake making here, I'm not going to do too much science, but there's a little bit, which is tempering. So you soak the whatever you're using, and then you boil it, and then you sort of put it into a sheet. And it's that drying out as a sheet that means that the moisture in it is evened out and it becomes easy to bake and flakes. So that's the essential thing. Bacon flake.

John's story, happy accident. He's playing about at home. gets called away to the sand, forgets what he's working on, leaves it overnight, and when he comes back and tries out, he suddenly realizes, ah, a miracle has happened, and now it flakes really easily, and that's the discovery of how you make corn flakes. Will says, actually, it was the two of them

deliberately working on it in the experimental kitchen, and that the mash was left for a lot longer and had become mouldy, but they didn't want to waste it, so they tried flaking it, baking and flaking it, and then they realised it worked really well. And then John wrote up a whole series of experiments for him to try, and Will put in 120-hour week. in order to try and perfect this particular method.

I'm going to go with the second one there. I'm going to go with William's version of events. You're going to go with the brothers spending hundreds of hours. I mean, that's how most foods are made, right? I mean, that's oftentimes how my dinner is made. Many, many hours spent trying to work on it. Okay, Vanessa, do we have a sort of instant breakfast revolution in America? Actually, yes.

It is a massive boom time for... Serial entrepreneurs, basically. So Battle Creek becomes this hub for serial production by 1900. There's over 100 companies there, all trying to make cereals. Some of them are innovating. Some of them are just copying each other. Some of them are literally stealing each other's ideas. And they have quite good names.

Yeah. So the ones actually in Battle Creek, some of them are familiar. Grape nuts are going to come out of Battle Creek. But also the first really sugary cereals like maple flakes, which are made with maple syrup, but outside of Battle Creek, there's ones which have very forceful names, like, well, Force. Vim and things like that. Zest.

Zest. Yes. Would you eat Vim? No, no. Didn't Vim become a, like, it was like a bleach, wasn't it? Maybe, maybe. I feel, I feel like.

But the most crucial thing we have to say, of course, is they were making these with wheat. Yeah, definitely. And then Will goes, hang on a second. Corn. Will really wants to go for nationwide advertising and getting this product out there and John says, no, I'm not interested.

It was just that wheat at the time was the dominant sort of crop. Ah, so, no. No. Will wants them to switch And when we say He wants them to switch to corn And we mean maize Just to be emphatic

It's American corn, not British corn So Will wants them to switch to corn Because it's easier to handle And it's sweeter and it just tastes better than wheat And John says no Because he thinks wheat is really healthy And that corn is not healthy Because corn tastes nicer than wheat

And therefore you just Yeah My wife has a term for things that taste Like they're good for you Which is like Tastes very worthy That's a subtle way of saying I don't like the taste of this

but I'm sure it's good for me Could we launch worthy flakes? Worthy flakes, yeah I'm getting a sense here that the brothers are still at loggerheads Are they still able to work together? No, Will decides he has enough and he leaves his job at the sand in 1901

Unfortunately, six months later the sand burns down and he gets roped back into the rebuild, the massive rebuild that John has planned. Poor Will, he was free! He was free and then he was sucked right back in again. Just one more job. Damn, I think.

came out, they pulled me back in. How do we know he wasn't the one who burnt it down? Oh, hello. He definitely got motive. There are many rumours, but it was probably the really complex electric plant, just had a bit of a spark. Okay, so it burned down, Will came back in, but then he goes on his own.

Will launches his own company, which will become known as the company that is now famous as the Kellogg's company, but that's not what he calls it to begin with. No, so in 906 February, he launches the Battle Creek Toasted Cornflake Company, really catchy name. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, I could see why he didn't stick with that. He changes the name of the food he's making to the sanitas toasted cornflake to corn crisp with a K and then finally Kellogg Corn Flakes and then he changes the name in the company to match it in 1909 to Kellogg Toasted Cornflake Company

which becomes the Kellogg Company in 1922. Quite a lot of rebrands. Yes. He landed on eventually just his own name as the brand name. Was that, had his name become, because of the sanatorium and stuff of that, had his name become a famous name

or did the name become famous after the cereal became manufactured? Great question, right? So Kellogg name was known as associated with health food products and with the San and with all the publications that John was putting out, but their food company was called the Sanitas Company, not the Kellogg Food Company, and this is a source of a lot of the conflict that they had. So it would have the Kellogg name on it, but that wasn't the brand name they were using. And so, I mean, John being a super-chill guy, as he was,

he reacted to his brother sort of launching a rival business in typical fashion he sued him for using what is also his own name he sued him for control of the family name what legal framework does he have there because Kellogg

will called Kellogg he's allowed to use his name yeah exactly yeah a lot of it is to do with the use of the signature on the box and the branding names and basically the two brothers get kind of locked into this series of suit and counter suit against each other and what I think we can probably call some quite petty recriminations.

So John starts copying Will's advertising style. And then when John starts making brand cereal, Will brings out all brand and brand flakes in response. Will wins the case out of an out-of-court settlement in 1911. So he has the right to use the Kellogg brand. But John Harvey doesn't stop with this process and brings yet another suit against him. And then finally, it's not until 1917,

when Will actually succeeds in fully winning back the entire brand name. He can use Kellogg and his brother can. cannot use Kellogg in the branding anywhere at all. So he wins our in the end. Yeah. And so if John hadn't sued William, he probably still could have used his name. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. That was the agreement they reached sort of in 1911,

but he continued to pursue to harass about it. And we'll... How are you feeling about all that bullying now, John? I feel at this point I should probably do a sort of impartial BBC voice and chase, just say other breakfast cereals are available because my producer...

Unfortunately, we have chosen to concentrate on one particular company. Okay, where does our story Then for the battling brothers, Vanessa, you said that they're suing and counter-sewing and eventually Will wins the right to have the Kellogg name and his brand. Do they ever reconcile? Do they ever get together at Christmas and go, oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I love you really. Unfortunately not. There isn't a happy ending here. John gradually gives up control of the sand through the 1920s. It's sold off to the US government in 1942 and he dies in Battle Creek in 1943. At the grand old age, it has to be said, of 91. So some of his lifestyle was very effective. He leaves his entire state. to the Race Betterment Foundation. Oh, John, come on.

See, that bit's not a happy ending. No. I mean, for those of us who see John as the bad guy and William as the good guy, you could argue that their lack of, what's the word I'm looking for, their lack of reconciliation is actually, you know, that is a good thing. It's certainly helpful that one of them is like a, you know, just still team eugenics all the way and the other guy is giving money to charity

and generally being quite a useful industrialist. Yeah, because, I mean, Will, Spence lots of time at his massive horse farm in ranch in California, but he also dies at the same age, 91 in Battle Creek. He had set up a philanthropic organisation about 20 years earlier, which is the WK Kellogg Foundation, and he leaves all of his estate to that. And it's a foundation that particularly looks at challenges facing children

and childhood development and children's charities. And obviously Kellogg is still here today. I'd like to think that as a counterpoint to the eugenics, that he ran his horse farm in a way where he didn't. He just let them fall in love with each other. He didn't put any thought whatsoever into breeding better, stronger horses. He just let the horses just find their own partners. Yeah, so there we go.

So that's the end of the family story. And as you say, the corporation obviously is still going pretty strong. The nuance window! Time now for the nuance window. This is the part of the show where Ed and I sit quietly for two minutes, while Dr Vanessa takes to the factory floor to tell us something we need to know about the Kellogg Brothers. Stopwatch is ready. Take it away, Vanessa. So I want to introduce a concept to try and understand the Kellogg's and the San, which is

techno-solutionism. That is faith in technological innovations to solve all our problems, including our social problems. It might seem counterintuitive for John Harvey Kellogg and the San because they're part of this broader health reform movement. It tends to talk about nature rather than necessarily science. It's a response to anxieties about modern life in industrialised capitalist cities. There's been very rapid social change. People aren't living, eating, working the same way that they had even a generation ago. The move from rural to city living had disconnected people from their food ways. They don't know where the food's being grown, how it's being transported, if the packet is truthful about what's inside

it. And although we're having fewer deaths, perhaps from things like cholera and plague and smallpox, we're now having new mysterious modern diseases, particularly amongst the middle classes, particularly amongst those who work in offices, headaches, digestive disorders, fatigue, stress, anxiety. And modern medicine doesn't have at this point a lot to offer to those people. And that's where the doctors, health reformers and entrepreneurs step in, not to reform society, but to offer these lifestyle changes, these new diets, these new regimes, these new health resorts to deal with these problems. A lot of them use a rhetoric not only of naturalness, but also the past, so looking nostalgically back to how we used to live a generation ago, but also even

further, looking to anatomy, biology, evolution to say how we should live and how we should live in a healthy way. The past will cure modernity. But that relationship is complicated when you bring the science in, because science and technology can make society too fast. It can process our food, but can also enable us to make a lovely, healthy, digestible cornflake, and we can have now sunbaths in the middle of winter. So people like John Harvey Kellogg don't want us to go back to that pre-industrial life. They don't want us to live like the people he called primitive savages. Instead, he wants to use technology to solve these problems. Our stomachs can't handle modern life, so let's use technology to predigest our food for us,

and then we can move through the modern world, perhaps more like a machine hybrid, a cyborg, than a natural animal for this new, exciting, modern world. Amazing. Two minutes on the dot. Look at that. Hang on. Thank you so much. Technosolutionism. Interesting stuff, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, I have to say I'm more so into eating now, but as a kid, I just found eating food was just something I didn't. Something I had to do, and I never wanted to do.

I never had much of bad. So I've always dreamed and looked forward to this future where we would have pills for breakfast. Oh, yeah. And I'm still, I'm more annoyed by that. than rocket packs. We all thought we'd be flying around in the TEDPacks.

Where's my hoverboard? Exactly. Thank you so much. Ed, thank you so much. Vanessa. If you want more from Vanessa, check out our episode on Victorian Bodybuilding and the,

what on the Northwest Passage, both fascinating. And for more American entrepreneurs, why not listen to our episode on P.T. Barnum, he was an absolute monster, or Madame C.J. Walker. She wasn't a monster.

And remember, if you've enjoyed the podcast, please share the show with your friends. Subscribe to You're Dead to Me on BBC Sounds. I just want to say a huge thank you to our guests. In History Corner, we have the fantastic Dr Vanessa Hagee from the University of Birmingham. Thank you Vanessa. Thank you for having me back. It was a pleasure. And in Comedy Corner, what a debut. We had the exceptional Ed Byrne.

Thank you, Ed. And to you, lovely listener, join me next time as we rummage through the pantry of history for another delicious box of facts. But for now, I'm off to go and sue my brother for control of the family name. Bye! Hello, I'm Brian Cox. I'm Robin Ines, and we're back for a new series of the infinite monkey cage. We have our 201 extravaganza where we're going to talk about how animals emote went around trains and tunnels or something like that.

I'm not entirely sure. You're doing one on potatoes. Of course we're doing one on potatoes. You love potatoes. I know, but... Yeah, you love chips, you love mash. I'll only enjoy it if it's got curry sauce on it. We've got techno fossils, moths versus butterflies and a history of light. That will do, won't it? Listen first on BBC Sounds. I'm Julie Andrews,

It is my great pleasure to bring you Jane Austen Stories, the new show from the Noiser Podcast Network. I'll be reading Pride and Prejudice. We'll walk grand estates and take tea with well-dressed gentlewomen, but in this tranquil corner of England, not everything is quite as it appears. Listen to Jane Austen Stories wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you.