mmm....

stoned wheat thins...

mmmm...

greg.

Alistair Bell wrote:

> I like Stoned Wheat Thins. I also like Graham Crackers, especially after
> reading about Sylvester Graham, perhaps the first of a long line of food
> ayatollahs.
>
> :)
>
> Alistair
>
> Sylvester Graham was born in 1794, probably the 17th child of a 70 year old
> father who was a minister of the gospel. At age two, Sylvester was an orphan
> and a ward of charity. We don't know much about what happened to him until
> at age 32, he showed up and enrolled at Amherst College in Massachusetts.
> There he argued with everyone who would stay around long enough to listen to
> him and gave long speeches to disrupt many of his classes. He was kicked out
> of Amherst and had a nervous breakdown or his nervous breakdown caused him
> to be kicked out of Amherst.
>
> His nurse, Miss Sara Eads, took care of him and as a reward for bringing him
> back to health, he married her. She soon became pregnant and he had to
> support a family, but the only skill he had was his big mouth, so he went to
> the Presbyterian Church and begged them to make him a minister. They
> ordained him, even though he had no formal education. He was such a
> convincing speaker, they sent him to Newark, New Jersey, where he became
> famous as a fire-breathing minister who warned about the dangers of alcohol
> and became known as the "suppressor of the Use of Ardent Spirits." A major
> problem was that while he was preaching the evils of alcohol, his wife,
> Sara, was tippling, and not always privately.
>
> While on a visit to Philadelphia, he met members of the Young Bible
> Christian Church. They preached abstinence from meat as well as alcohol. And
> Sylvester Graham became an ardent vegetarian. He became convinced that God
> did not want people to kill animals. He became very interested in health and
> the leading killer in 1830 in the United States was dyspepsia, which means
> an upset stomach. Doctors felt that people died because they had unhealthy
> bowels. He felt that bowel problems were caused by lack of bulk in the diet
> and every Sunday, from his pulpit, he screamed about the benefit of bran. He
> felt that God did not want people to split the wheat kernel.
>
> In 1830 nobody knew that 100% of the B vitamins, almost all the minerals and
> phytochemicals are in the germ that is removed when a miller makes white
> flour. He was truly a prophet, way ahead of this time. He became one of the
> most popular lecturers and screamed about the dangers of alcohol, white
> flour, gluttony, meat. He advocated bathing, which upset many of his fellow
> Americans because they took baths once a year, but only if they needed one.
> He stated that lewdness, excess sex and eating chicken caused cholera. To
> combat white flour, he created the Graham cracker, coarsely ground wheat
> that was bathed in molasses and cooked before it could turn rancid.
>
> Sylvester Graham was treated by his countrymen as either a nut or a
> religious man. But he preached against the dangers of alcohol, white flour,
> meat, gluttony, obesity and body odor. You may not agree with some of his
> views, but on the subject of flour...................