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\\nToday’s show is focused on fun facts about cereal. Growing up, cereal was a huge treat. My parents wanted us to have a balanced breakfast and they were also budget conscious. As a result, we had an endless supply of porridge and oatmeal. I hated both. I would often just eat leftovers from dinner the night before. 
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\\nDuring the summer, I would long for the sugary colorful cereal I\\u2019d see advertised during cartoons. I remember going to my grandma\\u2019s house growing up. She always had a selection of cereals. It was an amazing moment in time. I could enjoy as much Apple Jacks as I could stomach. Grandma also had a special drawer in her basement that had happy meal toys and cereal box toys that had accumulated over the years. She really knew the way to my heart with McDonald\\u2019s and cereal! 
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\\nThere were rare moments when visiting Grandma over the summer. If I was super lucky, I\\u2019d get to open a fresh box of cereal from the store. That meant the prize was still inside. Finally I was able to experience what the kids in the cereal ads got to experience. Amazing sugary cereal AND a fun prize. Could childhood get any better? 
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\\nIf you haven\\u2019t put two and two together yet, today is all about cereal. So grab a favorite box, your spoon and some milk and let\\u2019s dig in!
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\\nBrief History of Cereal
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\\nAs always, we have to go back in time and start at the beginning to really understand where we are today.
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\\nBreakfast cereal as we know it today got its start in the mid 1800s. James Caleb Jackson ran a medical sanitarium in western New York. He was religiously conservative and was also a vegetarian. He created a breakfast cereal from a whole wheat dough. Once the dough dried, they broke it into pieces. These chunks of cereal were so hard that they had to be soaked in milk overnight. He called it granula. 
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\\nJohn Harvey Kellogg iterated on this idea. Kellogg was a physician in a health spa in Michigan. He made his own version of the cereal and called it granola. One of Kellogg\\u2019s former patients, C.W. Post took this same idea and created grape nuts. 
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\\nJohn Kellogg and his brother Will, continued to work on cereal. Instead of dense chunks of wheat cereal, they developed a way to make a flaked cereal. They called this creation, \\u201cCorn Flakes.\\u201d
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\\nC.W. Post didn\\u2019t want to be outdone by the Kellogg brothers. He decided to develop his own cereal. This was the first major competition to corn flakes. I seriously laughed out loud when I saw the name of their corn flake competitor. Kelloggs stuck with something original and descriptive, Corn Flakes.\\u201d Post decided to name their product Elijah\\u2019s Manna. Obviously these cereal companies had strong religious roots, but this pushed things too far. A number of religious groups got very loud about Post\\u2019s choice of names for their product. Post caved to the pressure and eventually renamed the product, \\u201cPost Toasties.\\u201d Much better!
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\\nToys in Cereal
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\\nLet\\u2019s talk about prizes and cereal for a minute. Kellogg\\u2019s was the first cereal brand to include a prize with the purchase of cereal. In 1909 customers were given The Funny Jungle Moving Pictures Book when they bought 2 boxes of corn flakes. This promotion was a huge success. By 1912, Kellogg\\u2019s distributed 2.5 million copies of the Jungleland books.
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\\nIt didn\\u2019t take long for all of the other cereal producers to follow Kellogg\\u2019s example. Over the years, cereal producers had promotions that highlighted Star Trek, the Beatles, Ghostbusters, GI Joe and more. They offered candy, iron on patches, small toys and offers for shirts. One of the more bizarre offers I saw was a 1974 offer on Cherrios boxes.'