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I don't have a strong opinion on the present product of #GrapeNuts. But I do think Grape Nuts' historical roots are quite fascinating. It's a story that involves plagiarism, racism, and the scary idea of a "pre-digested" food. Buckle up for a nerdy #histstm thread 
Grape Nuts was first produced by C.W. Post in the 1890s. Post was a patient in John Harvey Kellogg's famous Sanitarium and probably stole some of Kellogg's ideas and recipes.
It's complicated because Kellogg regarded his health foods as a service to mankind. Kellogg's brother - not so much. He would go on to feud with Post for many years (Howard Markell describes their battle in his book The Kelloggs https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/216458/the-kelloggs-by-howard-markel/ )
Anyway, at the very least, Post was "inspired" by Kellogg's own cereal Granola which he had produced a few years earlier. Like Granola, Grape-Nuts also consisted of toasted wheat flakes
Both products, however, were only two among a veritable sea of so-called 'pre-digested' foods. This now forgotten fad in #foodhistory started with the discovery of digestive enzymes, which were then added to food to "artificially digest" or "predigest" foods.
Initially, enzyme-enriched foods were only used for bad digestion, but more and more, they were also marketed against sickness in general. The idea was that digestion is work, and during sickness the body needs to be relieved of that work so that it can focus on sickness
In the US, the predigestion craze took place amidst a general explosion of therapeutics of all kinds. Natural health practitioners like Kellogg reacted against this and decried what they perceived as an over-medication of society
So Kellogg came up with a "natural" alternative: Granola.
No enzymes were used in the process of making Granola, Kellogg claimed. Instead, it was made using a "natural method" that performed the same work as enzymes (that is, converting starch to sugar): toasting.
Through the heat of toasting, the hard-to-digest starch of the wheat flakes would be converted into "maltose" and "dextrose," that is sugar, like it would be during regular digestion. Granola was therefore marketed as a "partially digested" food.
When Post made his Grape Nuts, this is what he had in mind. Grape Nuts, like Granola, was marketed as based on a process of "natural predigestion."
And this is also why they were called "Grape-Nuts" (despite containing neither nuts or grapes...): 'grape' was a reference to grape sugar, or dextrose, one of the products of of starch digestion. 'Nuts' referred to the nutty taste of maltose.
The story gets weirder. These products might seem harmless, laughable curiosities to us today, but they were actually deeply steeped in racism
At the heart of the pre-digestion craze were fears about the degeneration of the white race. White people prided themselves on their "civilizational progress" but at the same time, they feared having alienated themselves too much from a "natural state," including a natural diet
The use of food itself was seen as a marker of "civilization." Cooking distinguished man from animals, and so, the racist logic went, cooking peoples were superior to those who did not cook their food
Pre-digestion was justified by many of its proponents as an extension of cooking, and like cooking, its use was interpreted as a marker of civilizational superiority
At the same time, there were fears that artificial digestion would essentially "un-teach" the body to perform its natural digestive function, which would then degenerate
So these "naturally pre-digested" or "partially digested" foods assuaged both fears: through technological progress, they improved digestive ability, but at the same time, they were not fully digested, and so allowed the white body to return to its "natural strength"
Just watch how this logic plays out in this ad for Grape-Nuts (warning, in case it hasn't become clear by now: this is racist stuff):
The ad makes a link between "dullness," a supposed "racial characteristic," and peoples who do not cook their food
Because "digestion is work," this "dullness" is construed as a the logical consequence of a non-white body overburdened with digestive work, and therefore unable to perform the same "intellectual effort"
But Grape-Nuts solve this problem! they help white people to "economize" their digestive energy so they can think better (if only)
Note how the ad deals with the fear of degeneration through "un-learning" to digest when digestive work is outsourced: there is "no danger of your Liver 'getting out of practice' through the use of pre-digested 'Grape-Nuts'"...
Anyway, the history of these things is WILD. If this piqued your interest, well you need to read my forthcoming book on the history of Wonder Foods, clearly. But now you need to get off Twitter and GO VOTE.
