In 1905 in Battle Creek, Michigan, Will Kellogg commercially introduced flaked and puffed cereal products through the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company, building on earlier health-food experiments at the Sanitarium run by his brother John Harvey Kellogg. The process of puffing grains through explosive steam pressure transformed whole grains into light, crispy, sweetened breakfast foods that were vastly more appealing than the plain cereals previously promoted for health. Battle Creek's cereal boom produced hundreds of competing brands and established sweetened breakfast cereal as a staple of the American diet, blurring the line between health food and the sugary cereals that would later be classified as junk food.

The Battle Creek cereal craze coincided with Progressive Era poetry's engagement with purity, corruption, and the body, themes that appeared in the work of poets like Edgar Lee Masters who explored Midwestern life and its reformist obsessions. The transformation of plain grains into sweetened, marketed products became a metaphor in later American poetry for the corruption of natural simplicity by commercial forces, a theme that resonated with ecopoets from Gary Snyder to Mary Oliver who wrote about unprocessed foods as symbols of authenticity.