The connection of appropriate food, sound health, moral development and self-control has a tradition going back to the early 19th century. Sylvester Graham, who began lecturing on health in the 1830's, presented America with a complete ideological system governing every aspect of "personal routine." Graham's ideas represent, according to Steven Niessenbaum, the "Victorian physiological theory" in "the act of coming into being." (1) Graham placed the fate of one's state of health on the activities of the stomach. According to Graham, "the more perfectly and rational the food of man is, the more perfectly the laws of his constitution are fulfilled...the more health will be in his body...the more perfect the senses...the more powerful may be intellectual and moral faculties be rendered by suitable cultivation."(2)
In Graham's system, all ill health arose due to overstimulation of the stomach. Inappropriate or excessive food irritated and inflamed the stomach which in turn disrupted the normal function of the nervous system and the flow of vital energy upon which life depends. (3) For Graham, the emerging market system in the early part of the 19th century was creating incorrect appetites for artificial, processed, over-refined foods. White bread was the prime example of a refined food that was leading to ill health. Much of Graham's campaign was to replace this overly refined bread with his own formula of whole bran, healthy, traditional bread. Graham also called for vegetarianism due to the excessive amounts of meat that he thought were being eaten as a partial result of the market economy.
Without following the natural "alimentary wants of the system", man became an over-irritated and unhealthy being, according to Graham. (4) This over-stimulation disrupted the ability to accurately perceive and interact with the real environment. The unhealthy lived in a perceptual haze. Moral development was impossible unless this irritation was removed. Hard work was impeded by the lack of vital energy flowing freely.
The only solution was for each individual to become his own agency of regulation. Like other reformers of his day, Graham placed the emphasis of his reform on the individual and his own moral development as the means of securing a better and moral future for all men. According to Niessenbaum in place of public scrutiny or social coercion, man "had to impose these things on himself." As larger social institutions and traditions became entwined within a hostile and artificial environment, each individual had to impose regulation upon himself, to achieve a higher state of physical and moral health. (5)
1. Steven Niessenbaum, Sex, Diet, Debility in Jacksonian America: Sylvester Graham and Health Reform, (Chicago, 1980), quotation on x.
2. BID.
3. IBID, 90-92.
4. IBID, quotation on 134.
5. IBID, quotation on 135.
Go to Wikipedia for more on Sylvester Graham
