Editing Graham cracker (section)

==History==
The graham cracker was inspired by the preaching of [[Sylvester Graham]], who was part of the 19th-century [[temperance movement]]. He believed that minimizing pleasure and stimulation of all kinds, including the prevention of masturbation, coupled with a vegetarian diet anchored by bread made from wheat coarsely ground at home, was how God intended people to live, and that following this natural law would keep people healthy. Towards that end, Graham introduced the world's first graham wafer product. It was a dull, unsifted flour biscuit baked by Graham himself.<ref name="Lachance Shandrow">{{Cite web |last = Lachance Shandrow |first = Kim |date = December 17, 2015 |title = The Seriously Unsexy Origins of the Graham Cracker |url = https://www.entrepreneur.com/living/the-seriously-unsexy-origins-of-the-graham-cracker/252725 |access-date = January 18, 2023 |website = [[Entrepreneur (magazine)|Entrepreneur]] }}</ref>

The sugarless wafers were a key component of the eponymous diet.<ref name="Lachance Shandrow"/> His preaching was taken up widely in the midst of the [[1826–1837 cholera pandemic]].<ref name=HistVeg>{{cite book |last1 = Iacobbo |first1 = Karen |last2 = Iacobbo |first2 = Michael |name-list-style = amp |title = Vegetarian America: A History |url = https://archive.org/details/vegetarianameric0000iaco |url-access = registration |date = 2004 |publisher = Praeger |location = Westport, Connecticut |isbn = 978-0-275-97519-7 |pages = 15–26 }}</ref><ref name=Eating>{{cite book |last1 = Smith |first1 = Andrew F. |title = Eating History: 30 Turning Points in the Making of American Cuisine |date = 2009 |publisher = Columbia University Press |location = New York |isbn = 978-0-231-14092-8 |pages = 29–35 }}</ref><ref name=Tompkins>{{Cite journal |last1 = Tompkins |first1 = K. W. |doi = 10.1525/gfc.2009.9.1.50 |title = Sylvester Graham's Imperial Dietetics |journal = Gastronomica |volume = 9 |pages = 50–60 |year = 2009 |issue = 1 |jstor = 10.1525/gfc.2009.9.1.50 }}</ref><ref>{{Cite journal |last1 = Money |first1 = J. |title = Sex, Diet, and Debility in Jacksonian America: Sylvester Graham and Health Reform |journal = The Journal of Sex Research |volume = 18 |issue = 2 |pages = 181–182 |year = 1982 |jstor = 3812085 }}</ref> His followers were called Grahamites and formed one of the first vegetarian movements in America; [[graham flour]], graham crackers, and [[graham bread]] were created for them. Graham neither invented nor profited from these products.<ref>{{harvp|Iacobbo|Iacobbo|2004|p=29}}.</ref><ref name=Tompkins /> [[Herman Melville]] has an early reference to the crackers in Book XXII, Chapter I, of his 1852 novel ''[[Pierre; or, The Ambiguities|Pierre; or The Ambiguities]]'':<blockquote>For all the long wards, corridors, and multitudinous chambers of the Apostles' were scattered with the stems of apples, the stones of prunes, and the shells of peanuts. They went about huskily muttering the Kantian Categories through teeth and lips dry and dusty as any miller's, with crumbs of Graham crackers.</blockquote>