The baby boomer generation, those born between 1946 and 1964, had a lot of fun and whimsical foods while growing up, like the discontinued Sealtest ice cream, with its checkerboard flavor combinations, and brightly colored Banquet TV dinners. Breakfast must have been an enjoyable time, too, with plenty of cinnamon toast to go around, biscuits and jam, oatmeal, and warm grits with farm-fresh eggs fried and placed on top. However, there was another popular spoonable breakfast food that dominated baby boomers' kitchens: farina.
If farina doesn't sound familiar to a younger audience, perhaps a couple of products made with it might ring a bell: Cream of Wheat or Malt-O-Meal. This creamy, slightly gritty wheat cereal, which was served hot, was quick to whip up on busy school mornings and was also versatile. Because farina is rather bland on its own, eaters could dress it up with a pat of butter and some milk or stir in sweet ingredients, like brown sugar or maple syrup. It was likely so widely consumed by baby boomers as they moved through childhood because it was easy to make, relatively inexpensive, and often touted as a nutritional powerhouse fortified with iron, calcium, and vitamins.
From ancient porridge to modern breakfast staple
Farina's broader history goes back much further than the earliest years of baby boomers' childhoods. Ancient peoples in Mesopotamia and elsewhere in the Fertile Crescent cultivated and ground wheat, using the grain to make porridges and other foods. Mesopotamia, located primarily in present-day Iraq, is also where some of the earliest known examples of writing were developed (along with some of the earliest evidence of fast food restaurants!). These early wheat dishes weren't necessarily identical to the farina sold today, but they were predecessors to the hot wheat cereals that would eventually become breakfast staples.
Farina was adopted especially into Jewish cuisine, and it is at least partially through these culinary traditions that the milled wheat product persisted through the centuries, until Jewish immigrants brought it to the United States. However, farina wasn't popularized outside Jewish communities until the late 19th century, when Thomas S. Amidon, the head miller at the Diamond Milling Co. in Grand Forks, North Dakota, suggested that the struggling business package and sell a wheat-middlings porridge called Cream of Wheat. The ensuing company was eventually acquired by Nabisco in the early 1960s.
Meanwhile, Malt-O-Meal was introduced in 1919 by miller John Campbell, who created the cereal by adding malt flavoring to farina wheat. Both Cream of Wheat and Malt-O-Meal are still alive and well today, with plenty of people still enjoying a little taste of their childhoods. However, many find that farina isn't quite as economical as it was when they were growing up — a casualty of the skyrocketing prices sweeping the cereal aisle, perhaps.