Sylvester Graham

The Reverend Sylvester Graham (July 5, 1794 – September 11, 1851), a 19th-century Presbyterian minister, was an American dietary reformer, best known for his emphasis on vegetarianism, the temperance movement and his emphasis on eating whole-grain bread; he did not invent graham flour, graham bread, or graham crackers, but those products were inspired by his preaching.

Graham was born in 1794 in Connecticut, to a family with seventeen children; his father was 70 years old when Graham was born and his mother was mentally ill. His father died when Graham was 2, and he spent his childhood moving from one relative's home to another. One of his relatives ran a tavern where Graham was put to work and his experience with drunkenness there led him to hate alcohol his whole life and forswear drinking, which made him an oddball among his peers at the time. He was often sick, and missed a great deal of schooling. He worked as a farm hand, cleaner, and teacher before deciding on the ministry as an antidote for his poor health. He entered Amherst Academy in his late twenties to become a minister as his father and grandfather had been, but was forced to leave when his schoolmates created a scandal by claiming he had improperly approached a woman. However, while he was at Amherst, his gift for oratory was first recognized.

He suffered a nervous breakdown as a result of his expulsion and moved to Rhode Island to recover, where he met the woman he married, who nursed him back to health. He studied theology privately, and in 1828 began working as an itinerant preacher in New Jersey.

In 1830 he was offered a position at the Philadelphia Temperance Society and accepted it. However, he quit the Temperance Society after six months to focus his preaching on health.

The Philadelphia Temperance Society was led not by ministers, as most other temperance societies were, but by doctors who were primarily concerned about health effects of alcohol. Moving in that company, Graham likely met two of the other fathers of American vegetarianism: William Metcalfe, an English minister who established a vegetarian church in Philadelphia, and William A. Alcott, a Philadelphia doctor who wrote extensively about vegetarianism and wrote the first American vegetarian cookbook. Graham taught himself about physiology and apparently arrived at his own conclusion that meat was just as much an expression and spur to gluttony as alcohol was, and that both corrupted both the body and soul of individuals and harmed families and society. He was influenced in that belief by the book of François-Joseph-Victor Broussais, Treatise on Physiology which was published in Philadelphia in 1826; the book claimed that what people ate had enormous influence on their health. Graham's interest was also captured by the books written by the German chemist, Friedrich Accum, called Treatise on Adulteration of Foods, and Culinary Poisons, in which he denounced the use of chemical additives in food and especially in bread, and Treatise on the Art of Making Good and Wholesome Bread; wheat flour at that time was often doctored to hide odors from spoilage, to extend it, and to whiten it, and bread was made from very finely ground flour (which Graham viewed as "tortured") and brewers yeast (used to make beer). Like other members of the temperance movement, Graham also viewed physical pleasure and stimulation, especially sexual stimulation, with suspicion as something that excited lust that led to behavior that harmed individuals, families and societies. Graham was also strongly influenced by the Bible and Christian theology in his own, idioscyncratic way; he believed that people should eat like Adam and Eve did in the Garden of Eden - only from plants - and he believed that plague and illness were not random, but rather were something that people exposed themselves to by living in ways that departed from natural law; he also urged people to remain calm, and not allow worry or lust to shake them from living rightly - perhaps one of the first people to claim that stress causes disease. From all this he created a theology and diet aimed at keeping individuals, families, and society pure and healthy - drinking pure water and eating a vegetarian diet anchored on bread made at home, from flour coarsely ground at home so that it remained wholesome and natural, and all without spices or other "stimulants" and a rigorous lifestyle that involved sleeping on hard beds and avoiding warm baths. This has been described as a very early example of preventive medicine. The emphasis on milling and baking at home was part of his larger vision of America in which women remained at home and nursed their families into health and maintained them there, as his wife had done for him.

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