This Iconic Snack Food Used To Be Eaten Like Cereal For An Old-School Breakfast

It's a Friday night and you're at the movie theater with an extra-large blue raspberry ICEE and a comically shaped bucket of popcorn, ready for two hours of action and adventure on the big screen. The grease and salt from the popcorn stain your fingers during the long movie (here's the special salt that makes movie theater popcorn so delicious), but you have enough leftover at the end of the night to take home, if you so choose. Maybe it'll become a snack tomorrow afternoon when you need something to pick on, or maybe you'll wake up in the morning and decide to eat it for breakfast. Not just as a snack, but as a cereal.

Though it's less common now, back in the day, it wasn't unusual to toss popped corn in a bowl with milk and eat the entire thing as breakfast. It was occasionally sprinkled with sugar or honey to make it sweet, or other times submerged in cream for a thicker consistency than regular cow's milk. People would pile it with dried fruits, fresh fruits, nuts, and spices to sweeten the "cereal" even more, though they were most likely using plain popped corn and not the salty, buttery stuff we find in movie theaters now, even though movie theater popcorn doesn't use real butter. The fad of eating popcorn for breakfast didn't last, but it was an inexpensive way to fill one's stomach. Since popcorn is, after all, a whole grain.

The origins of eating popcorn for breakfast are murky, though some speculate that the earliest accounts come from Native Americans teaching early American settlers to puff corn. Another theory states that popcorn for breakfast was popularized by Ella Kellogg, the wife of famed cereal inventor Dr. John Kellogg. Mrs. Kellogg supposedly enjoyed eating plain popcorn with cream, but a little digging on the internet and you'll find several recipes for whipping up the makeshift cereal with plain milk, some sugar, and toppings like dried coconut flakes or raisins. Some enthusiasts even recommend trying the "cereal" with caramel corn or kettle corn for an extra crunch and burst of sweetness.

Wherever the creation came from, eating popcorn for breakfast might just be the inspiration behind many of the modern cereals we enjoy today. Corn is one of the most common grains used for cereals. Just think about cereals like Kellogg's Corn Pops and Corn Flakes, which, coincidentally, work great for this crispy Cornflake ranch chicken recipe. Then there are the cereals without "corn" in the name that still use corn as a base, such as Apple Jacks, Cap'n Crunch, and Froot Loops. Transforming corn into tiny puffs for cereal as opposed to leaving it as popcorn meant that the new product was more shelf stable in its ready-to-eat form, so while popcorn may remain the snack of choice for evening movies, it's not necessarily the first thing people grab for in the morning anymore.