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Self Love and Cereal I: An Apple a Day Keeps the Hands at BayReform-minded Americans advocate vegetarianism as an alternate to masturbation. |
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The diet that sustained nineteenth-century America sucked. Meals were jam-packed with grease and unsavory pork products; people suffered incessantly from arteriosclerosis, heart disease and dyspepsia. The 1830 Encyclopedia Britannica defined this last one as "difficulty of digestion or fermentation in the stomach or guts", and continued, "few are so happy to pass through a life of ordinary duration, without undergoing a protracted struggle with this malady."[1] Everyone strolled about moaning and clutching at their bellies, even in polite company. It was ghastly and wholly embarrassing to all involved. Enter Sylvester Graham. A Presbyterian minister born in 1795, he had an okay grasp on human dietary needs for a guy who lived in the beginning of the 1800s. He called for conversion to vegetarianism and advocated eating more fiber. Looking at these benign suggestions, one might be tempted to think Graham had his head screwed on right, especially when contrasted with his bacon-fat slurping contemporaries. To do so, one would have to ignore certain outstanding facts about the man: his primary calling was a strong desire to eliminate the weaknesses in the populace brought on by, well, masturbation. He lectured ceaselessly on the topic, and was thoroughly convinced that furtive bouts in private drained life energies and sent the practitioner straight into a wretched, decaying sickness. According to Graham, a masturbator grew up ...with a body full of disease and with a mind in ruins; the loathsome habit still tyrannizing over him with the inexorable imperviousness of a fiend of darkness.[2] and noted that Pimples of a livid hue, come out upon the forehead and about the nose, and sometimes over the whole face -- and even ulcerous sores, in some cases, break out upon the head, breast, back and thighs; and these sometimes enlarge into permanent fistulas, of a cancerous character, and continue, perhaps for years, to discharge great quantities of foetid, loathsome pus; and not unfrequently terminate in death.[3] Sounds pretty grim. It was Graham's hope that a vegetarian diet would aid in suppressing one's indefatigable lusts. Why? Licentiousness, he felt, was intimately wrapped up in one's gustatory habits. Too much food, too little, eating at the wrong time, "All kinds of stimulating and heating substances; high-seasoned food; rich dishes", or too much meat led to nocturnal emissions, or, worse, lascivious feelings. It wasn't always food: "disproportionate exercise of the brain," he said, "leads to a general debility of the nervous system, involving the genital organs."[4] Lest these claims seem illogical, it's important to remember the power of self-delusion. Even if the personal experience of a closet masturbator or academician might argue contrary to Graham's claims, shame tended to prevent open discussion. A great many people listened to Graham and bought into his fruitcake theories. Was Graham Crackers?Nutty or no, however, Graham dispensed sensible dietary advice, and a country full of dyspeptic citizens was lucky to have him around. Some of the folks against him were ones that could tangibly count their losses due to his influence: Graham's harangues against meat and bakery-produced bread led to a number of assaults on his person from disgruntled Boston butchers and bakers in 1837. He also suffered wretched humiliation at the hands of a doctor of the Boston lunatic asylum who decided that he was insane after witnessing one of these spirited talks. The early 1800s weren't quite ready for him. After numerous women fainted at the frankness of his masturbatory lectures, he directed his energies more closely to training nutritionists and advocating things like toothbrushes and seven hours of sleep a night. Denied his one true love of publicly railing against self-abuse, he lapsed into unintelligible dotage. By 1850, one of his neighbors commented, he was "infirm, seated in a wheelbarrow, and clothed in a long dressing gown of bedticking, wheeled through the streets to the post office by a man-servant."[5] A Miller's TaleThere were others to pick up his torch. One such follower was Mrs. Ellen G. White, better known as the founder of the Seventh Day Adventist Church. Her lengthy affair with spirituality and gastronomic parochialism began when a visit with William Miller led to angelic visions. Like most religious epiphanies, this one requires a little explaining. William Miller, an unlettered bumpkin hailing from Low Hampton, New York, decided in the 1830s that the world was going to end very, very soon. Despite guessing wrong a few times, he bent thousands of ears and convinced them that on October 22, 1844 Gabriel's trumpet would sound and all hell would break loose. These folks gave away their material possessions and took to the hills and rooftops to await the coming of the Lord.
He didn't show. They waited outside in the mud for some days before forlornly returning to the homes they had abandoned and to the stores whose inventory they had freely given away on what were supposed to be the final days of humanity. While most everybody sat around dejected (except for those who sat around mocking them), at least White got something out of it: holy hallucinations. After meeting Miller, she had visions that led her to a higher calling. In a particularly vivid one, God uttered to her, "Come in to a supper," and she started thinking about food an awful lot. This led to visions of angels blaring the clarion call of a perfect diet. On June 6, 1873, a seraphim told her to eat two meals a day, chiefly of graham bread, fruit, and vegetables. To be avoided was salt, lard, spices, coffee, tea, tobacco, and physicians. Meat, which emboldened the "animal propensities", was also verboten.[6] Lettuce Eat WellBy the time the second half of the nineteenth century rolled around, people began to pay attention to their health and eating habits. This was a far cry from the dark ages of Graham crying out in the wilderness: professionals everywhere were starting to advocate their own special meals and dietary plans. For example, Dr. William A. Alcott founded the American Vegetarian Society, and toasted to "total abstinence, women's rights, and vegetarianism," with luminaries Harriet Beecher Stowe, Amelia Bloomer, Horace Greeley, and one Dr. James Caleb Jackson, who was later to invent the world's first breakfast cereal. Jackson espoused a cornucopia of nutball medical ideas. He was a fan of water treatment, which is the idea that immersing various body parts in water constantly was good for a person: "The water revolution is a great revolution... It touches more interests than any revolution since the days of Jesus Christ."[7] Not to be outdone in the food department by Graham, Jackson noted that "dyspepsia sometimes induces genital debility"[8] and invented graham crackers. Like Graham, Jackson felt obliged to pass the word about the evils of onanism. But, perhaps most memorably, he a mixed water and unsifted flour ground into little bits and baked it twice. He called this mess "granula", and it was the world's first cold breakfast cereal. The crunchy, flavorless concoction had to be soaked in milk to be soft enough to chew and was unappealing to the population at large, but, with the help of yet more enemies of self-love, was to spawn a mighty industry. Indeed, Jackson's pupils, haters of pleasure and businessmen all, would grow into industrial behemoths who waged war on one another at the breakfast table. But that is a story that will have to wait for next time. Footnotes
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