Food
A new heaven and a new earth; a new year and a new diet. In this week of sudden and short-lived faith in seaweed fasts and nutritional gurus, I thought it was worth mentioning the father of all modern diet crazes, the health reformer Sylvester Graham (1794-1851).
An evangelical New England preacher (and one of 17 children), Sylvester Graham turned in his thirties from the Gospel of Christ to the gospel of fibre. He was the original American health nut. Graham influenced most of the quack therapies of the last century, from veganism to phrenology to breakfast cereal. In the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, he was "the prophet of bran bread and pumpkins". Thousands of Americans attended his lectures and bought his books in the 1830s and 1840s.
The "Graham system", as he liked to call it, was based on the French vitalist school of medicine. Nutrition had moral as well as physical qualities and any desire for food, except for stark hunger, was depraved. The essence of Graham's philosophy was therefore minimal consumption of food and minimal sexual expenditure. Gluttony was, like sexual profligacy, the debilitating expression of an unhealthy urge. For Graham, dieting meant more than half-heartedly munching celery or going without the odd chocolate bar. It meant conducting an out-and-out war on debauchery in all its forms (and Graham saw debauchery everywhere).
In order to avoid "stimulation", Graham outlawed all spices - including pepper and salt - as well as alcohol, tobacco and opium. Butter, cream and - bizarrely - soup were also pernicious because they didn't offer enough "bulk" for their calories. It is ironic that the only living reminder of Graham - the Graham cracker - is now used as the base for creamy, calorific and thoroughly debauched cheesecakes.
The devil's own food for Graham was, however, not cheesecake but innocent-looking white bread, which epitomised the evils of modern life at every stage of its production and consumption. First, the earth was ravaged by greedy farmers to produce the wheat. Then bakers adulterated the flour with plaster of Paris. Finally, people bought it and ate it to the detriment of their "alimentary canal". Graham believed that even the healthiest person "could not survive very long" on a diet of "the very best superfine flour bread".
Graham's remedy to all these ills was bread baked at home from "good, unbolted wheatmeal, coarsely ground" and served "when at least 12 hours old" to avoid indigestion. This was "dyspepsia bread" and became a Temperance favourite for most of the 19th century. On the cusp of the 21st century, it is nasty enough to be used for a new year's detox. Graham's belief in his bread's healing powers was extreme. "There is no article of artificially prepared food known in civic life," he wrote, "the use of which more . . . keeps up the regular and healthful functions of the stomach and intestines."
So ambitious was the "Graham system" that he tried to introduce it into politics as well as morals. Just as the Spartans ate black bread, so should patriotic Americans eat "dyspepsia bread" and avoid the "soft, enervating luxury" which could undermine the republic. Graham even hoped to prevent wars with his diet. Given that his regime required no imported luxury foodstuffs, he believed it could avert all future "sanguinary national disasters", if universally observed. America would then become totally self-reliant, peaceful and free. All this from a loaf of brown bread!
Graham's ghost still haunts the modern world, in every fat farm and slimming book. And his peculiar system serves as a timely reminder that resolutions shouldn't be just for new year - but for life.
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