THE STAFF OF DEATH - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 40

manity from its biblical staff of life. Because white flour was so de-natured—so out of harmony with
Creation—it took a particularly devastating toll on the bodies and souls of those who ate it, inflaming
every joint and fiber and unhinging every rectitude. 21
In contrast to debased diets of meat and white bread, Graham preached the perfect meal, “highly con-
ducive to the welfare of bodies and souls”: locally grown whole wheat, recently ground and baked into
bread by a loving wife, accompanied by fresh fruit and vegetables grown in virgin, unfertilized soil, and
washed down with pure water. “They who have never eaten bread made of wheat, recently produced by
a pure virgin soil,” he proclaimed, “have but a very imperfect notion of the deliciousness of good bread;
such as is often to be met with in the comfortable log houses in our western country.” 22
In this evocation of local wheat, loving wives and mothers, log cabins, and virgin soil we begin to
get a glimpse of the politics of Graham's vision of good bread. During the early nineteenth century, the
country had begun to urbanize and industrialize. Although these changes would not really reach break-
neck pace until the end of the century, Graham, like many Americans, perceived an erosion of hearth
and home. Corrosive pressures of the rapidly expanding national market seemed bent on destroying in-
dependent agrarian households as the country's primary units of social life and economic production.
The explosive industrialization and commodification of food provisioning would happen later, but Gra-
ham had glimpsed the future and didn't like it. Changes in family sustenance were harbingers of moral
decline.
Raised by an affectionless mother, he pined for “mother's bread” as edible proof of love and kind-
ness. Like so many food reformers today, he longed for a mythical time when mothers, kneading bread,
firmly anchored in the home, held the nation's moral fabric in place. Graham railed virulently against
urbanites' emerging taste for bakery bread because professional bakers lacked mothers' moral sensibil-
ity. Though he moved in the social circles of suffrage activism, Graham's elegies to “good bread” rested
on a resoundingly conservative bedrock of traditional family values. As Little Women author Louisa
May Alcott trenchantly observed in an account of the Graham-inspired commune Fruitlands founded by
her father, Bronson Alcott, men sat around discussing the ethics of eating and farming, while women
did all the work. 23
In time, the cholera epidemic extinguished itself, vanishing as quickly as it had come. Graham's mes-
sage, on the other hand, proved more long lasting. By 1839, noted cookbook author Sarah Josepha Hale
could confidently declare that whole wheat bread was “now best known as 'Graham bread,' ” thanks
to his “unwearied and successful [work] in recommending it to the public.” Graham-inspired banquets
serving “simple farmer-like repast[s]” attracted East Coast luminaries such as the influential newspaper
editor Horace Greeley, an early and ardent convert, and key abolition and suffrage activists like Lucy
Stone, Frances D. Gage, and the Reverend John Pierpont. 24
As Graham's fame grew, he teamed up with the charismatic and influential reformer William Andrus
Alcott to spread the word. Indeed, William Alcott deserves much of the credit for popularizing Graham-
ism. Together they lectured across the country, edited health magazines, and founded the United States'
first health food store, providing Bostonians with whole wheat bread, fresh fruits, and “vegetables grown
in virgin, unfertilized soil.” They created the American Physiological Society to promote Grahamism
and supported the establishment of “physiological boardinghouses,” where unmarried or traveling male
Grahamites might find appropriate food and a pure moral climate. By 1854, four years after his death,
the New York Daily Times could depict Grahamism as a ubiquitous form of youth rebellion found on
college campuses. 25
For many followers, Graham's prescriptions simply offered a route to individual health. In an age
when meals were gargantuan and greasy, vegetables brutalized by endless boiling, and constipation a