Why is it that we often eat breakfast cereal with milk? How did this become a thing?
When I think about it, the combination of soggy grains and cold dairy just seems. . . weird.
Encyclopedia Britannica Editor
According to what seems to have become a somewhat standardized history of cereal, the collision of milk and cereal dates to about the 1860s (or 1870s?), when a breakfast cereal predecessor called granula came into being. Mental Floss describes the situation most succinctly:
Eaten dry, the granula was like trying to swallow construction rubble. In the newsletter, Lucretia [Jackson, a possible inventor of granula] cautioned that the cereal had to be soaked in milk or warm water, presumably to make it palatable. Other accounts of granula have consumers soaking it in milk overnight in order to make it chewable. People sometimes referred to it as “wheat rocks.”
From there, milk just...well, stuck around, according to these histories. Even as breakfast cereals became less like wheat rocks and more like granola -- the immediate successor to granula -- and corn flakes, they remained dry, so milk stayed in play as a useful tool to soften it up.
That's a logical story, but it doesn't really get at the why. There's a fierceness with which many of us, evidently, pair milk with cereal. Examples are many, though an incident on Reddit back in 2019 is a good one when viewed through the lens of the Daily Mail's treatment:
Man is branded 'disgusting' after he admits to eating cereal with WATER instead of milk - claiming it improves his breakfast
And an in-depth study by BuzzFeed a few years earlier concluded that putting anything but milk on cereal, as its headline puts it, "Was Horrible."
So is milk with cereal a foregone natural conclusion that was only unleashed by the invention of cereal itself? Or is it, say, the result of marketing that's made it difficult to imagine anything else? As Mental Floss also points out,
Like cereal, milk was also synonymous with health, full of vitamins and calcium. In a 1922 newspaper ad for Corn Flakes, Kellogg’s exhorted the wonders of the combination, offering that: “With cold milk and luscious fresh fruit, Kellogg’s are extra delightful—so crisp, and appetizing.”
At least two cereal makers today make vigorous cases for the healthful benefits of eating cereal with milk, one by way of footnotes and nutrition and scientific studies and the other by way of the declaration "Cereal and milk: a perfect match" (and one footnote). Which suggests that science is the reason for this combination...maybe?
Regardless of the true ("true"?) cause, though, there's likely one other reason that adults, at least, can't eat cereal without milk: nostalgia. As a willful hot take from 2018 puts it:
In addition to ease and cost, nostalgia was the primary reason responders cited as the driver behind their cereal consumption: “I had a long chat with some folks about this the other day,” one person told me. “We all agreed that we only eat cereal when we’re feeling super nostalgic! And, depending on my mood, I either go for the super sweet sugar bombs (that I was only allowed to eat at grandma’s house) or the boring cereals (Raisin bran) that remind me of what the adults were eating.”
“Cereal feels dependable and reliable, not to mention very comforting and nostalgic,” another wrote. “There’s nothing nostalgic about a protein shake or a poached egg!”
Perhaps it's better not to think about the why. It simply is, and, for those who have cereal with milk as kids, it always will be.