Find The Crazy Truth Behind Why Were Graham Crackers Invented

Graham crackers have a complete, innocent image. Children enjoy dipping them in milk. Kids huddled around a campfire spreading chocolate and toasted marshmallows between them to make S’mores. But a Twitter and TikTok trend has drawn the spotlight to the unusual origins of the world-famous and, most probably, world’s favorite cracker.

Today, the crackers usually are honey or cinnamon flavored and are most widely used to make s’mores.

But they date all the way back to the 1800s, and many people are just now finding out how they came to be.

Who Invented Graham Crackers?

Long before they were utilized to make s’mores or the tasty crust of a Key lime pie, graham crackers used a more puritanical purpose in 19th-century America.

The cookies were formulated by Sylvester Graham, an American Presbyterian minister whose beliefs on food, sex, alcohol, and nutrition would seem a bit harsh to today’s cracker-snackers.

Much like the mayor in the movie Chocolat, Graham and his thousands of followers—dubbed Grahamites—believed it was unethical to eat decadent foods. To battle this moral deterioration, Graham started a diet regimen of his own.

Why Did Graham Believe In Eating Whole Grains?

Graham operated health retreats in the 1830s that facilitated a bland diet that prohibited sugar and meat. According to Refinery29, Graham’s perspectives ultimately inspired veganism in America as well as the “first anti-sugar crusade.”

He criticized alcohol, tobacco, spices, seasoning, butter, and “tortured” refined flour. Caffeine was also a no-no. In fact, Graham understood that coffee and tea were just as bad as tobacco, opium, or alcohol because they built a “demand for stimulation.” However, the worst vice, in Graham’s opinion, was overeating. “A drunkard sometimes reaches old age; a glutton never,” he once wrote.

The underlying belief informed Graham’s simple philosophy that eating habits affect people’s behaviors and vice versa. He thought specific foods were “over stimulating” and led to impure thoughts and affections, or “self-pollution,” as he called it—which he believed to be an epidemic that resulted in both blindness and insanity.

Graham’s perspectives directly influenced Victorian-era cornflake inventor John Harvey Kellogg, born a year after Graham died. Like his ancestor, Kellogg acknowledged that meat and some flavorful foods led to sexual impulses, so he supported the consumption of plain foods, like cereals and nuts, instead. Unsurprisingly, the original recipes for both corn flakes and graham crackers were free of sinful sugar.

In one lecture, Graham told young men they could stop their minds from roaming to forbidden spots if they avoided “undue excitement of the brain and stomach and intestines.” This meant swearing off improper foods and substances like tobacco, caffeine, pepper, ginger, mustard, horseradish, and peppermint. Even milk was banned because it was “too exciting and too oppressive.”

So the important question raised that what could Graham’s followers eat? The core component of Graham’s diet was bread made of coarsely ground wheat or rye, unlike the refined white flour loaves that were available in bakeries at that time. This same flour appeared in Graham’s crackers and muffins, both of which were common breakfast foods. John Harvey Kellogg was known to have taken the crackers and apples for breakfast, and one of his first tries at making cereal involved soaking twice-baked cracker bits in milk overnight.

However, Kellogg was one of the few remaining fans of Graham’s diet, which started to fall out of favor in the 1840s. At Ohio’s Oberlin College, a Grahamite was employed in 1840 to strictly enforce the school’s meal plans.

One professor was fired for bringing a pepper shaker to the dining hall, and the hunger-stricken students organized a protest the following year, contending that the Graham diet was “inadequate to the demands of the human system as at present developed.” Ultimately, the Grahamite and his tyrannical nutrition plan were kicked out.

Much like Kellogg’s corn flakes, someone else stepped in and violated Graham’s crackers, molding them into the edible form we now know today.

In Graham’s case, it was the National Biscuit Company, which ultimately became Nabisco; the company started producing graham crackers in the 1880s. But Graham would likely be uneasy in his grave if he knew they included sugar and white flour—and that they are often topped with marshmallows and chocolate for a truly decadent treat.

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