Despite his intention to become a Lutheran minister, Henry J. Heinz found himself in the condiment business. He developed more varieties than the 57 which famously figure in the company's motto, but he stuck to that number anyway. Why? It had come to him in a mystic vision he had while riding the New York City subway.
[James H. Salisbury, whose self-inflicted nutritional experiments often entailed long periods of eating only one food, also had a vision of sorts: beef. In "The Relation of Alimentation and Disease" (1888), he declared that vegetables paralyzed the muscles of the stomach, making it "flabby and baggy." What we needed was beef, beef, and more beef, preferably pulped. Ironically, he may have had a beef with those who later lent his name to the Salisbury steak: according to food historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, what Salisbury in fact invented was... the hamburger.]
[Among history's most colorful food evangelists? Sylvester Graham, a revivalist preacher and the father of the eponymous cracker, who recommended wheat and celibacy; J. H. Kellogg, an Adventist, who stumped for grains; and a number of Quaker families, notably the English Cadburys, whose cocoa-business originally produced hot chocolate as a temperance drink.]
Sources
The New Yorker, 2002-08-19; Near a Thousand Tables: A History of Food
