Inventor of graham flour and the graham cracker
Sylvester Graham was an American Presbyterian minister (ordained in 1826) who
preached on temperance and stressed whole-wheat flour and vegetarian diets.
He was known for his graham crackers. His Graham Journal of Health and Longevity
preached his principles of good health. He compared people physiologically to
orangutans, and concluded that vegetarian food was natural for both primates.
Graham had many devoted followers, known as Grahamites, who slavishly followed
his principles, which included temperance, sexual restraint, and baths, in addition
to vegetarianism. He was so famous that his lectures on proper living were attended
by thousands, and he was able to hold his audiences spellbound. He had many
disciples who also worked diligently to further the vegetarian cause. When the
British Vegetarian Society was founded in 1847, he helped found a similar group
in America.
- Richard Schwartz
In 1831 and 1832, at the invitation of New York's temperance leadership, Philadelphia
activist Sylvester Graham delivered lectures on the relationship between diet
and disease. New Yorkers, Graham argued, had been fatally weakened in their
ability to resist epidemics by the improper eating habits spawned by big-city
life. Graham opposed the use of stimulants--not only liquor, wine, and cider
but tea, coffee, and tobacco too. He advocated vegetarianism. He denounced urban
bakers who used 'refined' flour--stripped of husks and dark oleaginous germ
and whitened with 'chemical agents'--because it baked more quickly than traditional
bread, even though the result was an almost crustless loaf without granular
texture or nutritional value. He railed, too, against marketplace milk, much
of which came from cows fed on leftover distillery mash (swill), with the anemic,
liquor-inflected product made presentable by the addition of chalk, plaster
of Paris, and molasses.
from Burrows, Edwin G. and Mike Wallace, _Gotham: A History of New York City
to 1898_; New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999