“There are those who would not eat them even dead and who consider them large hockey discs that taste like polystyrene, and then there are those who are crazy about them and who cannot live without these low-calorie, high-fiber snacks”: it was so that, in 1986, the Chicago Tribune described puffed rice cakes, in an article dedicated to the food “revolution” they had caused. Almost 35 years have passed since then and the rift between those who usually consume them and those who hate them has not changed much. Instead, the popularity of rice cakes, at the time very high in the United States and almost non-existent in Italy, and the idea that they are a healthy and healthy food, despite being still advertised in this way, have changed.
The fame of snacks in which you can indulge without worries dates back to the 1970s and 1980s, when health concerns and the idea of dropping a few pounds became mass, making the fortune of foods previously consumed by the few attentive to nutrition. So, says Brenna Houck on the gastronomic site Eater, crackers were presented as a healthy substitute for bread, crackers and other certainly less healthy snacks, filled with chocolate, creams and dried fruit; This was also confirmed by Quaker Oats, a major manufacturing company, which in the 1980s advertised them as an alternative to bread or a snack for women to take to work or to eat on the fly on the way home.
Houck also says that they were a popular snack for children of the eighties and nineties, stuffed in plastic bags to take to school for a snack, with the inevitable crumbling with each crunchy bite. Even then, those opaque wafers of air-swollen grains could be flavored with grains of salt or cinnamon or more greedily encrusted with chocolate and other flavors.
As the Chicago Tribune, to eat them were “men and women, adults and children, people who follow gluten-free diets, obsessed with fitness and normal people”, for breakfast, aperitif or sandwich version (the newspaper recommends them accompanied with eggs Benedict or roasted in butter and sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon), so much so that in 1985 the Americans had spent more than 20 million dollars on rice cakes at the time.
Although they gained popularity in those years, biscuits had been invented long ago: in 1901, by the botanist Alexander Pierce Anderson. At the time Anderson was working for the New York Botanical Gardens and was conducting experiments to test for the presence of water in the cores of starch crystals. To prove it, tells the New Yorker, Anderson filled hermetically sealed tubes with corn starch and wheat flour and placed them in an oven at 260 degrees centigrade; the pipes, pressurized by the rise in temperature, exploded and, Anderson noted, the cornstarch swelled into a “snow-white, porous blown mass” nearly 10 times the volume. The water in the starch, in fact, still liquid and pressurized due to the hermetic seal, vaporizes when the cap is removed and the pressure decreases; at that point the steam expands, swelling the starch.
Anderson realized that not only was he right but also that the discovery had commercial potential. He obtained a workshop to work in and funding from 20 wealthy Minneapolis, Minnesota entrepreneurs, who in 1903 then sold their shares in the project to Quaker Oats, a breakfast cereal company founded in 1870 in Ohio and then moved to Chicago. The name of the company was chosen by one of the partners after reading an article about Quakers and thinking that their exemplary qualities of integrity, honesty and purity would also connote his company and the foods it produced.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bn1IYlKiZk
Quaker Oats gave Anderson a laboratory in Chicago and was not interested in his discoveries until 1904, when Anderson presented them at the Universal Exhibition in St. Louis, where peanut butter was also presented and where, it seems, a Syrian from Damascus invented the ice cream cone. Anderson showed up at the fair with 8 bronze cylinders 50 centimeters long, filled each with 2 kilos of raw rice and then heated them. When he opened them, waves of puffed rice poured into a tall cage three feet wide; were bagged by his helpers and sold for 1 cent per bag: he sold 240 thousand for a total of 9 tons of rice, according to to the archives of the Minnesota Historical Society.
In 1904 American Cereal, a company controlled by Quaker Oats, offered Puffed Rice, a puffed rice breakfast cereal, and two years later QuaKer Oats added Puffed Wheat to its line of cereals, calling it “the eighth wonder of the world”. Meanwhile, in 1902, Anderson had obtained a patent for “a dry method for swelling starchy materials of all kinds and making them porous, increasing their nutritional value and making them more digestible.” His discoveries had been picked up by other companies starting with Kellogg’s, founded by one of the two brothers who invented corn flakes inspired by the health dictates of the Seventh Day Adventist Church and who served them, along with vegetarian and anaphrodisiac foods, to the sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan, a kind of guesthouse and spa for wealthy health-conscious people.
– Read also: History of peanut butter
In the 1920s, a certain interest in health foods was born and several shops opened taking inspiration from Martindale’s in Philadelphia, founded in 1859, and from the first “health food stores” in New York, specialized in the sale of cereals, rice cakes, yogurt and granula, the first breakfast cereal invented in 1863 by James Caleb Jackson (the name was later changed to the better known granola by Kellogg’s, for copyright reasons). Meanwhile, an advertisement from the 1930s he had nicknamed Quaker Oats rice cakes “food shot from guns of peace”, food shot from peaceful weapons.
After the Second World War, new technologies made it possible to produce rice and other puffed grains and attracted other companies to the market, such as Chico-San, which was born in 1961 as an importer of soy sauce and other products from Japan. He began selling brown rice cakes in the 1970s, and proposed using them instead of bread for spread on it jams, jam and fruit; in 1984 it was bought by Heinz, a historic canned food company, from beans, to soups, to sauces such as ketchup. In 1992, the market for rice and corn cakes in the United States was worth 174 million dollars at the time, and was growing; the following year Quaker Oasts bought Chico-San from Heinz, dominating 63 percent of the industry.
Although the success of rice cakes rests above all on being healthy, they are not that much: it is a false myth and a publicity stunt no different from that of broccoli chips, avocado and many superfoods – passed off as foods by almost miraculous powers – springing up every year.
– Read also: When you read “broccoli chips”, focus on “chips”
Rice cakes have about 400 calories per pound, more than the approximately 300 calories of a pound of bread; a slice of common bread weighs 2/3 times a biscuit, brings twice the calories but also has a satiating power at least twice as high. In addition, the biscuits have little fiber and a rather high glycemic index, equal to 85, which makes them unsuitable for people with diabetes and which keeps them full for a short time. It is also true that they are useful for those who are celiac and cannot eat gluten and that, packaged in single-use doses (possibly not plastic), they help to make a measured snack. These two aspects, combined with the advertising-driven image of healthy food, have helped boost sales of biscuits again: in 2019 Lundberg, a company that produces organic ones, saw a 14 percent increase in sales. . The association between crackers, health and well-being is also confirmed by the period in which they are sold the most: in January, immediately after the overeating of the holidays.
– Read also: Is gluten bad for you?
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