A Treatise on Bread, and Bread-Making

The scarce, first edition of this influential work advocating the use of whole grain flour for bread-making.

Reverend Sylvester Graham (1794-1851) was a vegetarian and the inventor of "Graham bread," known to us today in the rather corrupted form of the Graham cracker. His advocacy of whole grains and vegetables gave rise to a diet reform movement with strong moralistic overtones:

"In the 1830s, critiques of American food and eating were rampant and shrill, and usually attached to the name of Sylvester Graham, the de facto founder of the diet reform movement in the antebellum United States. During the 1830s and 1840s, the man Ralph Waldo Emerson described as the 'prophet of bran bread' made a name for himself lecturing and publishing books on diet and proper living...The diet reform movement influenced many Americans who did not consider themselves Grahamites. Nineteenth-century manuscript and published cookbooks included recipes for Graham bread, Protestant ministers offered sermons on the connection between diet and morality, and advice books urged healthy living based on Grahamite principles. In short, the ideas and values of the diet reform movement as initiated by Graham became part of mainstream American culture in the nineteenth century and beyond." -Lobel, Cindy. Sylvester Graham and Antebellum Diet Reform at the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History online.

REFERENCES: Lowenstein (3rd ed.) 211; Bitting, p. 197.