Crispy flakes, popped rice, “It’s grrrreat!” Over one hundred years ago, pieces of grain started to be part of the American diet in the form of cereal. Today cereal is eaten in more than 80 million bowls each day. The prepared breakfast cereal was part of the early vegetarian movement. Quaker oats and cracked wheat were some of the early forms of cereal that was convenient to eat in the late 1800s. In 1877, John Harvey Kellogg accidentally created wheat flakes, and his brother invented corn flakes from a similar method. They founded the Kellogg Company in 1906.
Kix was the first puffed cereal that was put on the market. General Mills and other companies made cereal into a large market with many of the new cereals having more sugar in it. Eventually cereals got mascots, had toy surprises in the box, and became “fortified” with vitamins and were promoted with health benefits.
Tattfoo Tan’s piece Enri¢hed is a project where participants can design their own fortified box of cereal. The artist will be present and will ask audiences to write down their ideas that will be put into a raffle drum. Other visitors will be asked to randomly draw out these pieces of paper and then draw the packaging for their product with colored markers. The space that the project occurs in is a space that will be “raining” with cereal created by a confetti blower. Enri¢hed will be at the Umami Food and Art Festival this Friday in Brooklyn, NY.
With the piece, the artist Tattfoo Tan is referencing to the term “killing the rat” which is from Robert Choate, an advisor to President Nixon in 1970 analyzed sixty well-known cereal brands for nutritional quality. His conclusion was that rats fed a diet of ground up cereal boxes with sugar, milk and raisins were healthier than rats fed the cereal itself.
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