Welcome back to Eating the Past, I'm your host, Sarah Berry.
This season we've spent a lot of time talking about spices and flavorings throughout history. So today I'd like to talk about a food that was originally defined by its distinct lack of flavor.
The graham cracker.
Graham crackers are named after Sylvester Graham, a nineteenth-century Presbyterian minister and American health reformer. And if you've ever eaten a modern graham cracker, especially one accompanied by chocolate and marshmallows, I have some very bad news. Graham would definitely not have approved.
The original graham cracker wasn't a sweet snack at all. It was a simple flavorless biscuit made from graham flour, a coarsely ground, unsifted and unrefined whole-wheat flour that Graham believed was healthier than the refined white flour that was popular in bakeries. It was meant to promote a healthy diet and disciplined lifestyle. And yes, graham flour is also named after Sylvester Graham.
Graham believed Americans had become too fond of stimulation. He encouraged people to avoid alcohol, rich foods, and what he called "spices and other stimulants." Instead, he promoted a simple vegetarian diet built around whole grains, fruits, and vegetables. Graham and fellow reformers believed that diet was also a moral issue. Strong flavors, he argued, stimulated the body in unhealthy ways and encouraged certain habits he believed were harmful.
Graham took bread especially seriously. In his 1837 book, Treatise on Bread and Bread-Making, he wrote that "there is a far more intimate relation between the quality of the bread and the moral character of a family, than is generally supposed." And quote “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, and never seem to think that they can possibly have anything better, nor even that it is an evil to eat such vile stuff as they do.”
That's a lot of pressure to put on a loaf of bread!
But these ideas didn’t come from nowhere. Graham was born in 1794 and grew up with many health problems, also witnessing alcohol abuse at home. He had a nervous breakdown in his twenties and withdrew from school. Flour adulteration was also a major concern at this time, with things like alum and chalk being added to make it look extra white or to hide spoilage.
A cholera epidemic was raging in the 1820s and 1830s. And as clergy, he was deeply embedded in the temperance movement which stressed morality in diet and lifestyle and linked it directly to sexuality and societal health. Many reformers taught that physical, moral, and spiritual health were interconnected. Take all of these factors together and you have a man who was very passionate about health reform.
His ideas attracted devoted followers known as Grahamites. They ate whole grains, embraced simple foods, and followed many of Graham's general health recommendations. Some people took offense to Graham’s work and more than one of his public lectures resulted in riots, which some newspapers attributed to his vegetarianism and not the angry butchers and bakers who apparently started it. While not everyone agreed with his views, particularly some of the more extreme teachings regarding sexuality, he helped popularize whole-wheat bread and influenced later health reform movements.
Decades later, reformers such as John Harvey Kellogg would promote similar ideas about simple foods and healthy living. The famous breakfast cereal movement that emerged from Kellogg’s Battle Creek Sanitorium owed at least something to Graham’s earlier work.
Of course, today's graham crackers are very different from Sylvester Graham's original vision. Modern versions are sweetened, often flavored with cinnamon. Graham never patented the graham cracker, so commercial products were sold by manufacturers after his death. Turns out that people generally prefer food that tastes good, so graham products became sweeter and softer.
The biggest milestone came from the National Biscuit Company (Nabisco). Nabisco tinkered with the recipe and launched the famous Honey Maid product in 1925. Notably, it was packed with sugar or honey and refined flour. Basically the opposite of what Graham wanted.
In a way, that transformation tells its own story. A food created to discourage excess eventually became one of America's favorite childhood snack treats. Yet the graham cracker still carries the name of a nineteenth-century reformer who believed that a simple unsweetened and unflavored biscuit could shape the health and character of the nation.
So while graham crackers may seem like an unusual topic to include in a season about spices, they remind us that food isn't only about the flavors people loved. Sometimes it's about the flavors they tried to avoid.
Thank you for joining me, and until next time on Eating the Past, every Sunday at noon before The Splendid Table on your UPR station.
