Graham crackers are a testimony in themselves of the religiosity that always has permeated food science in northern America. Graham crackers are inherently linked to the low-fat creed. William Sylvester Graham was a Protestant preacher who was the most famous advocate of a quintessentially American food movement that arose in the 1830s and 1840s that linked calls to avoid foods that deemed deleterious by science with strivings for “moral purity”. Their so-called scientific background was derived from the ‘vitalist’ theories then circulating in France. Graham opposed alcohol, —~later expanded to sexual activity, consumption of meats and spices~— on the basis that it sapped the nervous system’s vital force, “leaving the body prey to disease, debility, and death” adding a scientific dimension to traditional moral-religious prescriptions for sexual prudery and vegetarianism. Consequently, his followers set up the nation’s first health food store to sell unbolted ‘Graham flour,” thus the “Graham crackers”. Amongst the followers of the Graham diet were none but Henry Thoreau, Charles Finney, and… Joseph Smith. By the 1890s there was a reaction against the excesses of food lavishly imitating the French style. The “New Nutrition” food reformers tried to convert not the upper or middle-class from beefsteak to beans but the working class. They also advised them that most fresh fruits and vegetables were “wasteful extravagances. They were particularly afflicted by the apparent profligacy of Italo-Americans on this account. Enters Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, whose medical credentials were described as “unimpressive and scientific ones nonexistent” a direct heir of Graham’s ideas who became director of a Seventh Day Adventist-owned vegetarian health spa and managed to turn a virtually moribund institution into a trendy health spa catering to a clientele of non-Adventists who were convinced that its cures reflected the cutting edge of nutritional science. Many of Kellogg’s ideas were simply Graham’s dressed up in modern garb. Kellogg added to it, however, succumbing to the dangers of masturbation. Kellogg also had an obsessive fondness for the “purifying” virtues of enemas. Beneath it all, the Protestant strain of moralism persisted, along with its concomitant—guilt, which is not surprising given that food has now replaced sex as an object of guilt. It is to the “good” doctor Kellogg we owe the cereals…
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