Good Nutrition, Radioactive Breakfast Cereal

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Breakfast cereal advertisements: left, Quaker Oats (1906); right; Kellogg's Toasted Corn Flakes (1910s). via Miami U. Libraries - Digital Collections, Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia, used w/o permission.
(Breakfast cereal: wholesome, nutritious, and normally not radioactive. Ads from ca. 1900, left; 1906, right.)

I'd prefer living in an America where doctors never used kids as lab animals, and "feeble-minded" folks who were already locked up were not feared by the powers that be.

Charles Dudley Arnold's photo of Chicago Expo 1893; Court of Honor, Columbia fountain.But I live in a very real America.

We had problems in my youth. We still do.

This is not a perfect country, but on the whole I like being an American: and appreciate living in a country where we are allowed to learn about — and from — our past mistakes.

This week I'm talking about the time a giant of the food industry and a prestigious university dosed kids with radioactive breakfast cereal. I am not making that up.

More at A Catholic Citizen in America.

Feeding radioactive oatmeal to kids in the Fernald State School was a bad idea in the 1950s. It still would be. Ethics, eugenics and learning from mistakes.

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