Letter: Food for thought in Kellogg College

Sir: C. W. Blubberhouse is amused by Rewley House's proposed name-change to Kellogg College (Letters, 8 July), but why shouldn't an Oxford place of learning be linked with a corporation whose commercial nature is balanced by its benevolence towards a variety of social and environmental causes? If only more money-spinning organisations realised their civic duties, society might be in better shape.

Dr John Harvey Kellogg may have bemused the world with such inelegantly titled works as Disposal of Slops and Garbage and The Crippled Colon, and his regimen of several enemas a day does seem excessive; but he was among the first medical practitioners to realise that 'we are what we eat'. As both he and his brother, Will, lived to be 91, there must be more than a grain of truth in their nutritional theories.

Alan Parker's film The Road to Wellville may indeed have us all roaring in the aisles over the antics played out at the Battle Creek Sanatorium, but it will doubtless provide food for thought, too.

Yours faithfully,

ROGER DOBSON

Oxford