By exposing the fraud practiced by the health and nutrition industry in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century, Boyle suggests that nothing has changed in American society or business since then. Boyle never makes a direct connection between the state of the breakfast cereal industry in 1907, when the action of the novel takes place, and 1993, when the novel was published. Nevertheless, such a direct connection would be superfluous because at the time he wrote the novel, breakfast food companies were still notorious for their flamboyant packaging and marketing of relatively insubstantial cereals, and readers were likely to recognize the similarities between the past and the present.

Besides portraying the hypocrisy of one sector of American business, Boyle's novel shows also how the health and nutrition industry has served as a backdrop for various American political trends throughout the twentieth century. While the...