Sylvester Graham (July 5, 1794 – September 11, 1851) was an American Presbyterian minister and dietary reformer known for his emphasis on vegetarianism, the temperance movement, and eating whole-grain bread. His preaching inspired the graham flour, graham bread, and graham cracker products. Graham is often referred to as the "Father of Vegetarianism" in the United States of America.
Early life
Graham was born in 1794 in Suffield, Connecticut, to a family with 17 children. His father was 72 years old when Graham was born and his mother was mentally ill. His father died when Graham was two, 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. His experience with drunkenness there led him to hate alcohol his whole life and forswear drinking, which made him an exception among his peers at the time.
He was often sick, and missed a great deal of schooling. He worked as a farmhand, cleaner, and teacher before deciding on the ministry as an antidote for his poor health. He entered Amherst Academy in his late 20s to become a minister, as his father and grandfather had been. He withdrew from school a year later, because his histrionic manner was scorned by his fellow students.
The expulsion caused Graham a nervous breakdown. To recover, he moved to Little Compton, Rhode Island. There, he met and married Sara Earl, who had nursed him back to health. He studied theology privately, and in 1828 began working as an itinerant preacher at the Bound Brook Presbyterian Church in Bound Brook, New Jersey.
Career
In 1830, Graham accepted a position at the Philadelphia Temperance Society. He left six months later to focus on preaching health.
Graham's appointment and conversion to vegetarianism came as the 1829–51 cholera pandemic was breaking in Europe, and Americans were terrified that it would reach the United States. Accepted medical opinion was that the best way to prevent contracting cholera was to eat plenty of meat, drink port wine, and avoid vegetables. People also believed that cholera was a plague, a punishment from God.
The Philadelphia Temperance Society was led not by ministers, as most other temperance societies were, but by doctors who were primarily concerned with the health effects of consuming alcohol. Moving in that company, Graham may have 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 of and spur to gluttony as alcohol was, that they corrupted both the body and soul of individuals and harmed families and society.
His belief was influenced by the book Treatise on Physiology by François-Joseph-Victor Broussais, published in Philadelphia in 1826, that claimed 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 viewed physical pleasure and especially sexual stimulation with suspicion, as things that excited lust leading to behavior that harmed individuals, families, and societies. Graham was strongly influenced by the Bible and Christian theology in his own idiosyncratic way. He believed that people should eat only plants, like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and believed that plague and illness were caused by living in ways that ignored natural law. He 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.