Todays famous vegetarian birthday - John Harvey Kellogg

John Harvey Kellogg

Born February 26^th 1852

John Harvey Kellogg, M.D. was an American medical doctor in Battle Creek, Michigan, who ran a sanitarium using holistic methods, with a particular focus on nutrition, enemas and exercise. Kellogg was an advocate of vegetarianism and is best known for the invention of the breakfast cereal known as corn flakes with his brother, Will Keith Kellogg

John Harvey Kellogg was born in Tyrone, Michigan on February 26, 1852 to John Preston Kellogg (1806–1881) and Ann Janette Stanley (1824–1893). Kellogg lived with two sisters during childhood. By 1860, the family had moved to Battle Creek, Michigan, where his father established a factory making brooms. John later worked as a printer's devil in a Battle Creek publishing house.

Kellogg attended the Battle Creek public schools, going on to attended the Michigan State Normal School (which from 1959 became Eastern Michigan University), and finally, New York University School of Medicine. He graduated in 1875 with a medical degree. He married Ella Ervilla Eaton on February 22, 1879. They did not have any biological children, but were foster parents to 42 children, legally adopting eight of them, before Ella died in 1920. The adopted children include Agnes Grace, Elizabeth, John William, Ivaline Maud, Paul Alfred, Robert Mofatt, Newell Carey, and Harriett Eleanor.

Kellogg died on December 14, 1943 in Battle Creek, Michigan. He was buried in Oak Hill Cemetery, in Battle Creek, Michigan. Among others buried there are his parents, his brother W.K. Kellogg, his brother's wife, James White, Ellen G. White, C. W. Post, Uriah Smith, and Sojourner Truth.

John Kellogg and his brother Will Keith Kellogg started the Sanitas Food Company to produce their whole grain cereals around 1897, a time when the standard breakfast for the wealthy was eggs and meat, while the poor ate porridge, farina, gruel, and other boiled grains. John and Will later argued over the recipe for the cereals (Will wanted to add sugar to the flakes). So, in 1906, Will started his own company, the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company, which eventually became the Kellogg Company, triggering a decades-long feud. John then formed the Battle Creek Food Company to develop and market soy products.

A patient of John's, C. W. Post, would eventually start his own dry cereal company, Post Cereals, selling a rival brand of corn flakes. Dr. Kellogg later would claim that Charles Post stole the formula for corn flakes from his safe in the Sanatorium office.

He was a member of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. As an advocate of sexual abstinence, Kellogg devoted large amounts of his educational and medical work to discouraging sexual activity on the basis of dangers both scientifically understood at the time as in sexually transmissible diseases and those taught by the Seventh-day Adventist Church

Kellogg was outspoken on his beliefs on race and segregation, though he himself raised several black foster children. In 1906, together with Irving Fisher and Charles Davenport, Kellogg founded the Race Betterment Foundation, which became a major center of the new eugenics movement in America. Kellogg was in favor of racial segregation and believed that immigrants and non-whites would damage the gene pool.

Tom Coraghessan Boyle's 1993 comic novel The Road to Wellville is a fictionalized story about Kellogg and his sanatorium.

A film version of the book, directed by Alan Parker, was released in 1994. It starred Anthony Hopkins as Kellogg.