Sylvester Graham

This week's U.S. News and World Report has an interesting series of stories about food in the U.S. It makes the point that Americans are fascinated by food and I am a good example of that, I guess. One of the stories described the contribution of Sylvester Graham who invented the Graham cracker. He was a food fanatic of his day and believed that if we ate what Adam and Eve ate, we would be in physiological balance as nature intended. This ruled out meat, shellfish, salt, spices, sugar, coffee, tea, and alcohol. He was especially keen on controlling sexual urges through diet---especially masturbation. He felt that you need to avoid foods that stay in the body for a long time since they become fermented, turned to alcohol and this leads to nervous irritability and eroticism. This lead him to develop his own high fiber wheat flour from which he made his famous Graham cracker and, of course, we have now adopted his belief in high fiber diets even though I doubt many of us are selecting foods to suppress urges.