Modern sugary cereal is really damaging to our modern society. Don’t be silly, it’s not because they portray what is basically a dessert as a healthy way to start a day. No, today’s modern breakfast foods are too dang sexy! How are you supposed to live a nice, puritanical life if you have Cap’n Crunch making bedroom eyes with you across the table?
That was, more or less, the belief of Reverend Sylvester Graham. I will confess I may have made up the whole Cap’n Crunch thing, considering Graham died in 1851. What I am not making up though, is the whole sex thing.
Graham was a little bit of a prude, as most reverends in the early 1800s were. He saw all the youth around him partaking in hedonistic acts and it disgusted him. How could humanity be accepted into heaven if the kids were showing each other their ankles and dancing without keeping at least 6 inches of space between them?
Not to fear, however. Our man Graham cracked the case. He had the idea that if people ate good tasting food, then they are naturally hornier than those who only ate bad tasting food. Makes sense to me. Not only could tasteful food cause lust, but it could also lead to anything from seizures to insanity.
So now God’s chosen chef had a conundrum on his hands. How could he provide a barely edible food for all the good members of his community? Meat was totally out of the question. Meat was the epitome of giving in to carnal temptation. Perhaps fruit could suffice? Well, fruit spoils quickly and tastes good. He needed something that tasted slightly worse than woodchips and could last on a shelf. Then one night, in a burst of ingenuity, Graham exclaimed, “That’s it! I will make a cracker!” And he did.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is how the graham cracker was born. Being little more than wheat paste baked until hard, it met all the criteria of our Presbyterian preacher. Forget the sweet, cinnamon flavored treats we know today, the original graham crackers were basically just palatable enough to get down your gullet.
Graham spread his baked goods around his community, along with his preaching of a bland lifestyle. His lifestyle stuck around too. Its popularity lasted so long that in the late 1800s, a couple of brothers, John and Will Kellogg, began experimenting with their own bland breakfast cereals and successfully created corn flakes, and eventually the Kellogg foods company.
There you have it. Basically all of our most consumed breakfast cereals and campfire snacks began as a ploy to keep the youth from getting too frisky. I’m not sure Graham or the Kellogg brothers would approve of the colorful, sugary foods being branded by their names. I think the Kelloggs especially would turn in their grave if they knew their company was represented by the likes of Tucan Sam, a notorious sexual deviant.
