A staple of s’mores, pie crusts, and kindergarten snack times, graham crackers are a sweet treat for any age. But this mild cracker has a not so mild history.
Christian Roots and Kooks
The inventor of the graham cracker is none other than Sylvester Graham. Born in 1794, Graham grew up with a desire to be a minister, achieving his dreams by being ordained into the Presbyterian church in 1826.1 Along with other Christian leaders of that day, he promoted temperance and spoke out against alcohol, but Graham’s beliefs quickly snowballed into a laundry list of requirements to meet his definition of a moral person, most of which revolved around what someone eats and drinks.
Graham had an interest in anatomy and how heavy drinking and gluttonous eating could affect health. Because of this research, he recommended a vegetarian diet (with a particular emphasis on whole-grain products), regular exercise in fresh air, routine bathing, and abstaining from caffeine, alcohol, and tobacco. While this guidance all seems like sound advice for living healthier, Graham’s motivations weren’t just to keep his followers in tip top shape: His recommendations were centered around preventing sexual immorality.
Sexual Seasoning and the Morality of Food
Graham’s teaching emphasized a boring diet, eschewing foods with too much flavor or fat that could overexcite your average Christian into stumbling into sexual sin. He believed that mild tasting meals would dull the libido and decrease the urge to masturbate. Graham wrote in A Lecture to Young Men on Chastity, Intended Also for the Serious Consideration of Parents and Guardians (1848) about these dangers: “All kinds of stimulating and heating substances, high-seasoned food, rich dishes, the free use of flesh, and even the excess of aliment, all, more or less — and some to a very great degree — increase the concupiscent excitability and sensibility of the genital organs, and augment their influence on the functions of organic life, and on the intellectual and moral facilities.”2
Health journals and tracts quickly picked up Graham’s work, publishing and spreading his message to the masses at a much quicker pace than he could do as a lone lecturer. Dr. William Alcott, editor of the Boston Health Journal, raved about how the recommended regimen can prevent sexual temptation, “It is peculiarly suited to raise man from a state of sensual degradation and raise him to the rank, which as a rational and immortal being, nature intended he should occupy.”3
So You Want To Start a Cult
The concept of Grahamism soon rose in popularity, with staunch followers labelling themselves as Grahamites. Not only did they strictly follow Graham’s teachings on lifestyles, but in some major cities they even lived together in “Graham boarding houses” where Grahamites could enjoy fellowship by eating vegetarian meals, bathing in hot water three times a week, and reading weekly issues of the Graham Journal.3
In 1837 Graham published A Treatise on Bread and Bread-Making, which recommended only using coarsely ground flour, today called graham flour, and baking bread at home.4 This recommendation incited commercial bakers across the nation against him. That same year there was an altercation at a temperance hotel in Boston between a mob of bakers and butchers protesting Graham, who was there to lecture on one of his many speaking tours. The situation was quickly handled by several Grahamites who were prepared for such a squabble, with the followers pouring lime powder from the hotel’s roof to disperse the crowd.5
It’s believed that the origins of the modern day graham cracker came from this great push from Graham to make mild, low-fat, whole-grain foods at home. Over the years bakers and commercial productions have mixed in processed white flour to cut the coarse graham flour, adding sweeteners like honey and sugar to create the snack we know and love today, which most assuredly would not have met Graham’s standards for curing sexual immorality.
- Encyclopedia of World Biography Online. Detroit, MI: Gale, 2021. Gale In Context: Biography (accessed January 5, 2022). https://link.gale.com/apps/pub/3SDW/BIC?u=carnegielib&sid=bookmark-BIC.
- Graham, Sylvester. Essay. A Lecture to Young Men, on Chastity. Intended Also for the Serious Consideration of Parents and Guardians, 40. Charles H. Peirce, 3 Cornhill, 1848.
- Shryock, Richard H. “Sylvester Graham and the Popular Health Movement, 1830-1870.” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 18, no. 2 (September 1931): 172–83.
- Graham, Sylvester. A Treatise on Bread and Bread-Making. Boston, MA: Light & Stearns, 1837.
- Iacobbo, Karen, and Michael Iacobbo. Essay. Vegetarian America: A History, 50. Westport (Conn.): Praeger, 2004.
Hungry History 