Puffed Wheat

Title: Advertisement for Puffed Cereal
Type: Advertisement
Date: 1930
Source: Minnesota Historical Society

Description: Quaker Oats published these ads encouraging people to buy Anderson's puffed cereals.
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Activities:

1. What benefits does the advertisement suggest can be found in puffed rice and puffed wheat?
   
   
   
   
   Answer: The advertisement states that puffed grains are more digestible and almost as nutritious as cooked cereals.
2. What are the challenges of using an advertisement as a primary source in this case?
   
   
   
   
   Answer: This advertisement will not say anything about possible problems with puffed cereals. It is trying to get you to buy the product, so its view point is biased. To use it as a source in your research, you need to be able to check its claims against other sources, such as newspaperor magazine articles about the product or consumer or medical reviews.
3. This ad was published in 1930. How is this ad different from many of the cereal ads you see today?
   
   
   
   
   Answer: This advertisement contains a great deal of text describing how the cereal is made and what its nutritional value might be. In food advertisements today, you rarely see paragraphs of information for the consumer to read when making a decision about a product.
4. Why do you think it was important to the Quaker Oats Company to emphasize its cereal as "virtually as nourishing as hot cooked cereals"?
   
   
   
   
   Answer: Quaker Oat's claim about the nutritional value in its cereals suggests that many people at the time considered hot cereal to be more healthy and more nourishing than other kinds of cereals. In order to compete with hot cooked cereals, Quaker Oats tried to convince buyers that the new product was just as nutritious.