But are you SURE it’s GRANola?

It’s clear that our audience is both adventurous in their culinary bean-scapades AND maybe ever-so-slightly conservative when it comes to matters of the King’s English.* “Can you really call it GRANola if it’s made out of BEANS?”, a shocking number of you have asked. Okay, smarties, let’s get into it.

First, a brief history: hot porridge has been a staple food for thousands of years, but the dual innovation of cold-and-crunchy didn’t hit the breakfast cereal scene until the 1860s when Dr. James Caleb Jackson, owner of an upstate New York sanitarium and ahead-of-his-time gut health influencer, baked and crumbled brittle cakes of graham flour into milk for his ailing patients. He called it Granula.* And though that sounds unappetizing, John Harvey Kellog (yes, those Kellogs), stole Jackson’s idea and served a similar cereal to the patients of HIS sanitorium. To avoid legal challenges from Jackson, Kellog changed the “u” in Granula to an “o” and, within a decade, Americans were consuming several tons of Kellog’s Granola per week.* It wasn’t until hungry mirthmakers at the Woodstock Music Festival passed around their own version of now-lower-case-g granola that it became popular with the health-conscious masses.*

And now a little etymology. The “Gran” in both Granola and Granula comes from the Italian “grano” meaning “grain”.*  Today, “grain” primarily means the seed or fruit of a cereal grass.* Which, okay, beans are not. However! “Grain” used to mean, “a single, small hard seed,”* which kind of sounds like a bean if you ask us. Plus, people are always talking about taking things with a grain of salt, or looking for a grain of sand, or even going against the grain of a nice piece of hardwood. So, “grain” can mean a lot of things. (For those still wondering, the -”ola” is a commercial suffix likely popularized by the painola, a delightfully spooky automatically playing piano.*)

Finally (!), we conclude with a little philosophy. Ludvig Wittgenstein taught us that the meaning of language comes not from words corresponding to things in the world, but from how words are actually used in the practical "language games" of everyday life. We’re just playing with beans and words over here. Cut us a little slack?