Cracker, Graham

Sylvester Graham, namesake of the cracker, was a 19th Century theologian and lecturer who advocated an Edenic Diet, believing what was good enough for Adam and Eve was good enough for modern man. And like many Christians, the important part wasn’t so much of what Adam and Eve actually ate as much what they didn’t have to dine upon  – alcohol, meat, shellfish, sauces, condiments, coffee, tea, refined sugar and the especially pernicious white flour.

In Graham’s lifetime, new wheat rollers constructed of steel, made it easier to remove the bran and endosperm from the wheat berry in the milling process, making for a whiter, albeit less nutritious flour. At this point, people often tangentially talk about the purity and by extension importance of white flour - to which I say STFU. The oily endosperm severely reduces the storage life of flour, oxidizing flour and making it rancid. Removing the nutrient rich other husk has some downsides – namely pellagra but vitamins and essential amino acids weren’t exactly the pressing issues of the day. Besides, the popularity of white flour had far less to do with the aesthetics and theoretical implications of purity and much more to do with price and shelf-life - both improved with the new milling methods and improved transportation.

Graham’s conjectures didn’t stop with white flour; Chicken pie is a direct cause of cholera. He was more sex obsessed than a closeted evangelical, lecturing that masturbation would lead to blindness, paralysis and senility. Sex, marital sex even, more than once a month would cause “languor, lassitude…feebleness of circulation, chilliness, headache, melancholy, hypochondria, hysterics…weakness of the brain, loss of memory, epilepsy, insanity and apoplexy. Epilepsy and apoplexy wow, I think Dan Savage might point out this dude wasn’t sex positive. 

Emerson chided him as “the prophet of bran bread and pumpkins”, begging the question - Are you going to take that from a Unitarian? At least the anabaptists didn’t go at Graham with pitchforks and sticks - At least 3 mobs of bakers and butchers attacked Graham in his life. They took exception to Graham’s preaching as a detriment to their trade and businesses and sought to drive him out of town by force.

Modern vegans point to Graham as an early leader. Graham did oppose drinking milk, not so much due to animal rights but urban dairies where cows were fed on brewery mash, and as a founder of a temperance league, Graham’s concern wasn’t exactly the same as Moby's. It might be telling that vegans look to someone who was so dead set of against earthly pleasure and enjoyment as an early adapter of their cause, but in a post otherwise filled with double checked facts, that is an opinion.

Graham published his ideas about diet, abstinence and temperance in The Graham Journal of Health and Longevity, at the time popular; it lost some of its cache when Graham passed away somewhere between the ages 54 to 57 (his birth year varies). For all his wackiness, the dude did get most of his dietary information correct: The key to healthy diet is eating a wide range of foods with emphasis on fresh fruits and veg. Speculative history is onanistic in a way Sylvester Graham probably would have objected to, but one wonders what he would have preached in a more scientific time - Would the clinical study of the effects of food in the diet tempered is beliefs or would he have just found something else to object to.


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