Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey brain Stuff, Lauren Vogelbaum. Here, let's face it, one of the best things about making a camp fire is making s'mores, the quintessentially American treat consisting of a toasted, gooey marshmallow and a square of melted chocolate pressed between two crisp Graham crackers. But have you ever wondered where graham crackers came from or where they got their name?
The original Graham cracker was a health food developed in the eighteen thirties from the teachings of an American food reformer and religious teacher named Sylvester Graham, who, by all accounts, would be appalled by what's called a Graham cracker today, which is typically made with refined flour, high fructose corn syrup,
and a dab of honey for marketing purposes. Instead, Graham's original cracker called for just wheat and Graham flower, a form of whole wheat flour made by grinding the endosperm of winter wheat into a fine powder and mixing it with the bran and wheat germ. It has of coarse texture and nutty flavor. The resulting cracker contained no sugar or fat and often had to be softened by soaking or boiling before eating. But we spoke with New York
based food historian Sarah Wassburg Johnson. She said, it's funny that of all the things that he talks about with his health reform, that's the one thing that gets widely adopted and has his name. Graham Flower gets adopted by people who may not even be aware of him, even towards the end of the nineteenth century, and persists into some of the twentieth century. You hear about Graham gems
and Graham bread and cookbooks up to the nineties and fifties. Graham, who was not a doctor, although he sometimes went by Doctor Graham, was horrified by the overprocessing and enriching of wheat flour and believed that the loss of fiber and other nutrients in white flower ruined consumers health. In seven, Graham public a pamphlet entitled A Treatise on Bread and
Bread Making. In the intro, he wrote, thousands in civic life will for years, and perhaps as long as they live, eat the most miserable trash that can be imagined in the form of bread. He was basically advocating for a whole wheat homemade bread, and was thus hailed by the philosopher poet Ralph Waldo Emerson as the prophet of bran bread. Graham was a proponent and follower of vegetarianism, founding the
American Vegetarian Society in eighteen fifty. He also believed in limiting exposure to most spices, refined sugar, and all processed foods. A Presbyterian nster, Graham was a member of the Temperance Movement, abstaining not only from alcohol, but even from using yeast in baking. Johnson explained, I think that's why Graham crackers became a thing, because they were unleavened. They didn't have
brewers yeast in them. The Temperance movement was a big part of a certain kind of Protestantism, but the really hard core tempt prince people like Graham believed you couldn't use yeast because yeast produces alcohol. In addition to writing about food, Graham also gave lectures on diet reform that are difficult to separate from his religious philosophy because he himself did not Graham's views on diet were linked not only to physical but also to moral and spiritual health.
He promoted daily bathing, toothbrushing, eating three regular meals a day, getting outside, drinking only the cleanest water, and exercising all great stuff by today's standards. He also believed that illness came from immorality, including indulging in any form of lust or sexual contact for any reason other than procreation, and
even that any more often than necessary. Many of Graham's recommendations for healthy living, cold baths, sleeping on hard mattresses, standing from alcohol, meat, sugar, spicy foods, refined foods, and even warm foods were meant to help you avoid over stimulation and thus protect you from sinful temptation, and Johnson points out that these practices were also similar to those of the self disciplinary esthetic monks of the medieval period,
which were partially in response to the plague. She explained, many of Graham's health reforms that happened in the nineteenth century come out of a series of cholera and typhoid epidemics. That's where the water cure comes in, and the emphasis on the health and sanitation of avoiding the excesses of life that people thought might be a factor in disease. At the time, technological change and new urbanism brought about
changes in society that not everyone viewed positively. Graham was rightly concerned about food purity and the dangers in commercial food production as populations shifted from farms to cities, but his religious convictions tempered the lasting influence of this man, who was a forerunner of the American health food movement. Johnson said he believed there's less peer pressure to behave correct lee if you moved to the city where you're
not known to everyone. A lot of his ideas are about control and how you create order in a time of changing chaos. He stripped a lot of the joy out of life, eating, sex, sleeping in baths, which is why his actual teachings are not adopted. Part of it is the temperance. Part of it is the self denial. Who wants to sleep on a board if you don't have to? Who wants to take a cold bath if you don't have to? But Graham flower, especially if you're
using freshly ground whole wheat, is delicious. It's really good and does have a lot more flavor than white flower. I can see why that would be the thing that persists, but at the time he had thousands of followers referred to as Grandma's. American author Louisa May Alcott's family kept a Graham table where meat, tobacco, and coffee were banned.
Graham greatly influenced other health reformers who are also religious leaders of the day, including Ellen White, an adherent of Seventh Day Adventism, and Dr John Kellogg, another Seventh Day Adventist, who, along with his brother Will, invented granola corn flakes, the foundation of the Kellogg's brand, and who also would have been horrified by what we modernly do with his creations. Today's episode was written by Patty Resmussen and produced by
Tyler Clang. For more in this lots of other granular topics, visit how stuffworks dot com. Brain Stuff is production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.