Sylvester Graham and His Crackers

By the 1830s the American diet was largely based on meat and white bread; fruits, vegetables, and coarse breads were not thought to contain much nutrition. So it is quite understandable that most of his contemporaries regarded Sylvester Graham as a pure eccentric. A Presbyterian minister, Graham was hated and sometimes attacked by butchers, bakers, and liquor and tobacco companies for railing against meat, potatoes, tobacco and alcohol, coffee and tea, and chocolate and pastries and for preaching for the consumption of pure water and coarse bread made of unsifted flour. At the same time Graham had a fair number of devoted followers, known as Grahamites, who founded "Graham boardinghouses," where his dietary regimen was observed, in Boston and New York City.

Beyond diet, Graham recommended hard beds, cold baths, open windows, loose clothing, vigorous exercise, and daily toothbrushing (then a revolutionary idea). Influenced by the perfectionist impulse of the Second Great Awakening, Graham cast sin in a physical framework and advocated fighting it through bodily self-restraint and suppression of libidinal impulses. At the height of the 1830s health craze he inspired, Graham lectured to huge audiences and wrote several books on temperance and nutrition, including the extremely popular Lectures on the Science of Human Life (1839). Graham's ideas influenced Amos Bronson Alcott's Fruitlands community, Brook Farm, and the Oneida Community. Graham himself suffered poor health throughout his life; although he followed strictly his own lifestyle recommendations, he died at the age of 57 after a round of failed Grahamite cures. Many of his ideas, however, have since been proven correct and have become widely accepted.

Graham's original whole-grain wheat bread recipe eventually found a more appealing successor in the Graham cracker (according to most sources Graham invented the snack in 1829). Many commercial bakers tried to market the treat after Graham's death, but it was not until 1898 that the National Biscuit Company (now, Nabisco) came up with its Nabisco Graham Crackers. Today Nabisco turns out some 50 million packages a year to meet the unwavering demand. The irony is that these Graham crackers are made with bleached white flour, a deviation that would have infuriated Sylvester Graham, for he regarded refined flour as one of the greatest dietary evils.