What is granola? Who invented?

Granola is a compound of five toasted cereals – oats, rice, wheat, corn and rye –, mixed with honey or brown sugar and fruits, such as raisins, apple flakes and chestnuts. Well, that’s the current recipe, but granola wasn’t always like this. In over a century, the list of ingredients for this morning food has changed a lot. It all started around 1830, when the American William Sylvester Graham, staunch supporter of vegetarianism, invented wholemeal flour, a preparation made only from ground cereals, without any additives. Three decades later, in 1863, sanitarian James Jackson roasted such whole wheat flour, creating a bran that he named “granula”. The story got complicated in 1870, when another sanitarian, the American John Harvey Kellogg, created a mixture of roasted oats, wheat and corn grains to serve to his patients. He also called the goroba “granula”. But Jackson assigned him a lawsuit and Kellogg had to change the name of the invention: the name “granola” was born, patented in the 19th century. The craziest thing is that the invention did not catch on at the time and ended up half forgotten. Kellogg himself was shy about promoting it because he got rich by inventing a corn paste – Corn Flakes – soon after. But in the 1960s, granola fell into the graces of the hippie movement, which began to extol its nutritional qualities. In the following decades, it gained fame beyond the menu of “alternative societies” and invaded the tables of the world. In the table below, we tell you a little more about the nutritional characteristics of this natural range.