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Kellogg sold almond-peanut milk
Adventist origins
A woman named Almita Lambert wrote a cookbook that told readers how to make milk out of peanuts, almonds, hickories, and other nuts. Lambert was a Seventh Day Adventist, and Kellogg started out as one. Seventh Day Adventists are encouraged to follow a plant-based diet, and that was their motivation.
Plant milks catch on
Dairy milk was increasingly seen as dangerous, and that made their plant-based alternative more interesting to the rest of America. People were looking into rice milk too, and soy milk had a brief burst of popularity in Europe and the US in the early years of the 20th century. Henry Ford told the New York Tribune that cars would replace horses and that milk from plants would replace milk from cows.
These alternative milks gained some attention but never became mainstream in Europe or America, and by the 1950s they were back to being super niche.
Why do Adventists follow plant-based diets?
The Seventh Day Adventist church grew out of a 19th-century religious movement, and its leader Ellen G. White taught health reform in the 1860s, including a vegetarian diet. Adventists read that teaching as a call to care for the body. John Harvey Kellogg ran the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan, which put those ideas into practice. The church was formally organized in 1863.
How did the Kellogg brothers invent cereal?
John Harvey Kellogg and his brother Will Keith Kellogg invented flaked corn cereal at the Battle Creek Sanitarium in 1894. They were looking for easy-to-digest foods for patients on a vegetarian diet. Will later started his own company to sell it, and the Kellogg Company was founded in 1906.
Why was Henry Ford into soybeans?
Ford believed farm crops could supply industry as well as food. He built a soybean research lab in Dearborn, Michigan, in the 1930s. His company used soy-based enamel paint and plastic parts in cars, and it made soy products for people to eat.
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