Being a life-and-times of packaged cereal pioneers Charley Post and the Kellogg brothers, who made Battle Creek, Michigan into home base for the emergence of mass-market cereal manufacturing and marketing at the turn of the last century. The story is told against the backdrop of the nineteenth century's quirky pseudoscientific health fads, such as the utility of eliminating sexual desire through vegetarianism, phrenology, hydrotherapy, and the elder Kellogg's gigantic sanitarium, whither thousands repaired to improve their health. Also highly visible in the narrative are the Kelloggs' ugly feud and the involutions of their Seventh Day Adventist denomination's infighting.
This is a lot of ground to cover, and the book ultimately falls of its own weight. It's at its best when it paints with broad strokes and tongue-in-cheek voice the wild claims of the health faddists of those times. However, the narrative is also disjointed, repetitive, and introduces far too much detail on the cereal industry; there are limits to how much one can care about minor variations in the recipes, trademark litigation over brand names which have mostly been extinct for the better part of a century, or how many boxes of cereal can be loaded into one boxcar. ( )