Did You Know That Breakfast Cereal Comes From a Gun?
14th August 2013
One of the pivotal innovations in the way we prepare and package ready-to-eat foods came with the invention of the puffing cannon, a machine for heating up and pressurizing starchy foods to the point where they would explode into substantially larger, puffier shapes. It was, in effect, applying the familiar popcorn-making technique to the full range of other starches: rice, wheat, corn, lentils, and the like. The puffing gun was later superseded by more advanced machinery, but it’s now being brought back — on the basis of a Kellogg brothers patent filed near the turn of the century — by Dave Arnold, the founder of a new Museum of Food and Drink in New York City.