While running the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan, the deeply religious Seventh-day Adventist physician John Harvey Kellogg and his brother Will Keith Kellogg accidentally invented flaked corn cereal while seeking a completely bland, anti-aphrodisiac diet food to curb sexual desire and masturbation, which they believed caused insanity. Will Keith subsequently added sugar to the flakes and mass-marketed them, founding the Kellogg Company and permanently transforming the global breakfast landscape from hot, heavy meats to cold, grain-based processed cereals.

The bizarre, highly puritanical intersection of extreme sexual repression, modern industrial dietary processing, and aggressive capitalist advertising became a frequent subject for late-twentieth-century satirical poetry and cultural critique. Poets used the crunchy, sanitized cornflake as a potent literary metaphor to expose the deep anxieties, clinical sterile environments, and underlying hypocrisies of modern American puritanical culture.