Graham crackers were inspired by the preaching of which 19th-century minister?

Graham crackers were inspired by the preaching of 19th-century Presbyterian minister Sylvester Graham.

Graham promoted a strict health-and-temperance regimen in the United States during the 1830s. He advocated vegetarian eating and bread made from coarsely ground, unsifted wheat, which he believed better suited natural human health than refined foods. His followers became known as Grahamites.

The original graham wafer was very different from the sweet honey- or cinnamon-flavored crackers commonly sold today. Early versions were plain, sugarless biscuits associated with Graham’s dietary teachings. Graham himself did not invent or profit from the later commercial products bearing his name; followers and food manufacturers developed and marketed them.

The name is also easy to confuse with later health-food figures such as John Harvey Kellogg. Kellogg was influenced by some reform-era dietary ideas, but the cracker’s namesake was Sylvester Graham. Graham flour, graham bread, and graham crackers all descend from this 19th-century reform movement.