Sylvester Graham hated sex. The puritanical 19th-century minister preached that “carnal desire” caused headaches, epilepsy and even insanity.
To stop his followers from getting frisky, he invented a bland, biscuit-like cracker to “cure” masturbation and quell sexual urges in 1829.
Its name: the graham cracker — the snack that’s since become the stuff of s’mores and kindergarten classrooms.
How the cracker went from an anti-sex propaganda meal to the backbone of America’s favorite campfire treat is one of the food world’s most bizarre stories, experts and historians told The Post.
The tale features a major American corporation, angry mobs of protesters, a fad diet and early “medicine” in all its quackery.
The masturbation crusade
The man behind the cracker was born in Suffield, Conn., in 1794. Graham’s parents died when he was young, so he turned to the Presbyterian Church for support.
He became obsessed with health, in part because he was a frail and sickly boy. He went on to study the human body at Amherst College but dropped out because few people liked him.
After working as a farm hand and a teacher, he climbed the ranks of the church, preaching that sex, materialism and gluttony made people physically ill.
Masturbation was the worst, he proclaimed, because it “inflames the brain more than natural arousal” and amounts to “self-abuse.”
Eating and drinking delicious foods, including meat, coffee and spices, “stimulated” those sexual urges, he claimed.
“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,’” said Adam D. Shprintzen, who wrote about the cracker’s odd origin story in his book, “The Vegetarian Crusade: The Rise of an American Reform Movement, 1817-1921.”
The minister urged his devotees to help launch one of America’s first vegetarian movements by swearing off meat. He believed wholesome food made wholesome people.
So he set out to create a snack that reflected his values: a brittle, flavorless whole wheat biscuit.
“He spoke about how the cracker could help suppress sexual desire, particularly in adolescent boys. And he gained some hard-core followers,” said Shprintzen, who is also a professor of history at Marywood University in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
Hard to chew
The graham cracker, in its first form, wasn’t supposed to be sweet or delicious. Graham developed his own special process for baking with finely ground, unbleached wheat flour, wheat bran and coarsely ground germ. He first made the cracker in Bound Brook, NJ, in 1829.
“It was stale-tasting and harsh to chew. It would be hard on our modern palate. It was partly a response to the rise of industrial baking, which he thought was a less healthy form of bread,” Shprintzen explained.
But coupled with his religious lectures, his grain-based diet took off in the 1830s, sparking the modern-day equivalent of a fad diet. (Think gluten-free craze, in reverse.)
The “Graham Diet” was chock full of simply prepared whole-grain breads and starches with little seasoning. Meat, coffee, alcohol and tobacco were forbidden.
For how bland his food was, Graham was a bit of a food snob.
In 1837, he wrote, “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, not even that it is an evil to eat such vile stuff as they do … I have thought, therefore, that I could hardly do society a better service, than to publish the following treatise on a subject, which, whether people are aware of it or not, is, in reality, of very great importance to the health and comfort of every one.
“There are few products of the vegetable kingdom which are still higher in the scale of nutriment than wheat,” he declared in his book, “A Treatise on Bread.”
White bread made with bleached flour caused “a lazy colon,” he claimed.
The followers
Graham gained thousands of cracker-munching followers, dubbed Grahamites, who saw him as a visionary, in the 1830s.
They swore by the diet’s life-changing impact, gushing in letters that it had healed them of everything from nervousness to headaches and depression.
“As warped as he was, from a medical standpoint, he was ahead of his game in some ways. We know now that diet is connected to physical health and too much meat and alcohol isn’t good for us,” Shprintzen said.
But well-established medical journals dismissed him as a crank.
As years passed, other reformers became focused on issues like women’s rights and slavery — but Graham stayed fixated on sex.
“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 Atlantic magazine.
Other scholars faulted him for fueling guilt tied to sex and food in America.
“More than any other antebellum American, Graham helped establish the rationale for Victorian sex ethics … Graham’s dual obsession with food and sex was complementary; both drives represented dangers to complete self-control and independence,” Jayme A. Sokolow wrote in “Eros and Modernization: Sylvester Graham, Health Reform, and the Origins of Victorian Sexuality in America.”
But even back then, some people had a beef with the veggie-boosting zealot — including a group of furious butchers and bakers who once stormed one of his lectures, claiming he was bad for business.
A mob of angry men also protested, calling him crude for discussing sex in front of women.
“It irked men in some of these Northeastern communities. It was seen as being unseemly to talk about sex around women,” Shprintzen said.
Later, John Harvey Kellogg, of Kellogg’s cereal brand, considered himself a Grahamite when he created “granola” cereal in 1878.
Kellogg also launched Corn Flakes — which went on to revolutionize the breakfast-cereal industry — with those same values.
“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.”
Campfires and kindergarten
The cookie-like graham cracker of today didn’t come about until Nabisco bought the brand in the 1890s.
The firm added a hefty dose of sugar and cinnamon and changed the recipe significantly over the years. Nabisco now sells two types of graham cracker: Nabisco Grahams and Honey Maid Honey Grahams.
In the interim, Boy Scouts were credited with inventing s’mores — a play on the phrase “some more” — with marshmallows and chocolate on outdoor trips as early as 1925. The cracker later became a popular snack at elementary schools, too.
Graham was sure his theories about food and sex would be proved correct. He even predicted his home in Northampton, Massachusetts, would be turned into a national shrine.
But Graham, who died in 1851, is probably rolling over in his grave, Shprintzen said.
“He would have seen the modern graham cracker as something to avoid. It leaves his ideology in the dust,” he said.
After all, the cracker now represents the opposite of everything Graham stood for: sweet, palpable pleasure.