As far as snacks go, graham crackers seem pretty tame. However, a recent wave of online discovery has prompted scandalized reactions to the true origins of the sweet treat.
“I need you all to go Google why graham crackers were invented,” one surprised person wrote on X. “Apparently this went around on Twitter a few years ago but I am just now seeing this for the first time.”
Graham crackers were created by Sylvester Graham, a 19th-century Presbyterian minister. Like many of his ilk, Graham spoke out against sinfulness in all its forms. But Graham was especially fixed on sex and masturbation as one of the greatest evils of the day.
“Graham was an extremist. There were other popular health reformers at the time, but sexual urges was his particular thing,” Dr. Ruth Clifford Engs, author of Clean Living Movements: American Cycles of Health Reform, told The Atlantic.
sylvester graham believed that eating meat caused ‘primal instincts’ and sexual urges
Masturbation was the worst, he claimed, because it “inflames the brain more than natural arousal” and amounts to “self-abuse.”
Graham also was obsessed with health, and espoused the idea that a person’s diet could stimulate their sexual urges.
“He was on a strong anti-masturbation crusade. He said, ‘If you’re eating meat, you’re acting like an animal and you should avoid those types of primal instincts — like the urge to have sex,’” Adam D. Shprintzen, explained to the New York Post.
Shprintzen, a professor of history at Marywood University, wrote about Graham and his eponymous cracker in his book, The Vegetarian Crusade: The Rise of an American Reform Movement, 1817-1921.
In his efforts to purify his body, Graham ultimately swore off meat, coffee, alcohol, and tobacco. He swore by whole grains, which led to the development of the first graham cracker in 1829.
Made with unbleached wheat flour, wheat bran, and coarsely ground germ, the first cracker was nothing like the graham crackers of today. (That change wouldn’t occur until Nabisco bought the brand in the 1890s and started adding sugar.)
Brittle, stale-tasting, and “harsh to chew,” Graham thought his crackers “could help suppress sexual desire, particularly in adolescent boys.”
Despite the taste of the namesake cracker, Graham’s preaching and strict diet gained popularity in the 1830s. It was perhaps one of the earliest versions of a “fad diet.”
Graham thought his namesake crackers “could help suppress sexual desire, particularly in adolescent boys”
One of his most famous followers was John Harvey Kellogg, of Kellogg’s cereal.
Kellogg created his first “granola” cereal in 1878, and later developed Corn Flakes, with Graham’s values in mind.
“Kellogg was more responsible than any other person in his generation for popularizing the fallacious disease of masturbation,” author John Money wrote in his book, The Destroying Angel: Sex, Fitness, and Food in the Legacy of Degeneracy Theory, Graham Crackers, Kellogg’s Corn Flakes and American Health History.
Both Graham and Kellogg would likely shake their heads at the fact that today, both Corn Flakes and Nabisco’s sweetened graham crackers remain nearly as popular as masturbation itself.
And it would probably add an extra sting for Graham to learn that in 1925, the Boy Scouts invented the most popular graham cracker snack of all time: the s’more.
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