A REVERSE APHRODISIAC
The Curious History of Graham Crackers and Corn Flakes
Popular in the United States, the graham cracker is more of a cookie, typically sweetened with sugar, honey, and cinnamon. Despite their place in America’s heart, however, the current recipe is a far cry from the original invention. This first recipe yielded a mild, unsweetened biscuit made of unbleached flour with bran and wheat germ added.
The creation of the original graham cracker is credited to an early 1800s Presbyterian minister by the name of Sylvester Graham, who introduced this snack item as part of a vegetarian diet that eschewed white flour and spices. Why cut out ingredients that were inherently vegetarian? Graham hoped to end what he believed to be the scourge of his time: self-pleasure. And food, he believed, was the way to do that.
Graham, one of seventeen children, believed sexual urges were something that needed to be repressed, and found “self-abuse”—a colloquialism common in the 1820s and 1830s—to be a particular ill of society. Through a combination of pseudoscience and faith, he concluded that a vegetarian diet consisting of fruits, vegetables, limited dairy, and bland starches would result in an end to lustful behavior. For the last two decades of his life, he preached that his diet, later called the Graham Diet, would help followers (called Grahamites) abstain from sexual activity—particularly from self-pleasure, which Graham argued led to insanity and blindness.
The Grahamite movement waned after its leader’s death in 1851 (at the age of fifty-seven), but one man in particular stayed true to Graham’s bland food (and sexual abstinence) edict. That man, Dr. John Harvey (J.H.) Kellogg, was the superintendent of the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan, and he insisted that patients abide by a similar diet. He enlisted the help of Will Keith Kellogg, his brother and the sanitarium’s bookkeeper, to help feed the patients, and in 1894 they invented Corn Flakes.
How this invention came about is hotly debated; per one story in the Lemelson-MIT Program’s Inventor of the Week archive, John accidentally left out cooked wheat “for several hours.” It became “softened” and “temperate,” and not wanting to waste it, the Kelloggs decided to force it through the kitchen rollers to soften it for consumption. Instead, the wheat came out hard, and in a flake form. Dr. Kellogg served the flakes anyway, and they were genuinely well received by the sanitarium’s patients.
The two brothers then went into business selling their newfound cereal—but their goals were very different. While Dr. Kellogg was focused on the invention’s use in his practice of Graham’s teachings, his brother Will had something else in mind. Will saw a mass-market opportunity for the flakes by simply adding a touch of sugar to them. This difference in ideas caused a rift between the brothers, but nevertheless, Will founded the Kellogg’s corporation—now an $18 billion company. J.H. continued to focus on “rehabilitating” self-pleasurers, and without much success; by 1920, he—the very last member of the Grahamites—had all but ended his anti-sex crusade.