Dec. 2, 2025 – Andy is in OurLittleCorner today

Graham Crackers in Milk: Tasty Kids’ Snack or Covert Libido Suppressant?

After posting my previous blog about simple snacks it occurred to me that I should have mentioned one of my own favorite childhood snacks – graham crackers in milk.  One of my fondest childhood food-related memories is of my mom filling a glass with crushed-up graham crackers and topping it off with milk.  I also recall that to enjoy it to its fullest you had to eat it while the crackers still had a little crunch left before they turned to complete mush.  It was a bit tricky, but if there ever were a kid-friendly comfort food that was it.   Or so I thought.

Now, some 70-plus years later I’m wondering if my mom was plying me with milk-soaked graham crackers for reasons other than pleasing her little boy with a tasty snack.  And I’m wondering why my mom never fixed that snack for my sister. These thoughts came to me after coming upon a 2014 article published in The Atlantic by Adee Braun with the intriguing title Looking to Quell Sexual Urges? Consider the Graham Cracker.

To understand the connection between graham crackers and “sexual urges” we have to know something about Sylvester Graham, the cracker’s namesake. Graham was a Presbyterian minister who in the 1830s was a heavy hitter in the temperance movement. He was not only opposed to alcohol, he considered the prevailing American rich and meat-centric diet to be deplorable and advocated for a “healthier” plant-based diet similar to what Adam and Eve followed in the Garden of Eden (although he failed to mention if that included the infamous apple). Graham had a particular gripe with processed foods, especially mass-produced bread made with white flour, a subject he ranted about in his book A Treatise on Bread, and Bread-making (available for your pleasure here at Gutenberg.org).

Catering to Graham’s preaching, his followers (known as Grahamites) began making whole grain flour (dubbed graham flour) that was coarser and supposedly healthier than the more finely-milled flours of the time. The main edible made from this flour was a cracker (which became known as the graham cracker). It was reputed to be “bland” and “pretty awful to eat.”

But for Graham, blandness was the point. And this is where the sex connection comes in. As Adee Braun put it:

The moral and physical health of young men was at the core of much of Graham’s preaching. This is from Wikipedia: “Graham believed that following his prescribed diet would help prevent impure thoughts and, by extension, reduce masturbation, which he considered a cause of blindness and premature death.”

Graham died in 1851 at the age of 55, impoverished and evidently bitter that his movement had lost steam. It wasn’t until about fifty years after his death that his crackers began to sell commercially and then in 1931 the National Biscuit Company (Nabisco) introduced a sugary variety that captured a mass market. By then Graham’s diet and lifestyle system was long forgotten. In her Atlantic article Adee Braun notes that “The only real lasting notoriety Graham received was through the cracker that bears his name, and which also happens to embody the very things he spent his life railing against: sweet flavor and mass production.”

Looking back, there is no way for me to know whether or not my mom offered me graham crackers and milk based on some lingering belief that diet could possibly put a damper on my “carnal urges.” I tend to think not. But then, how do you explain that I never went blind?

To top off today’s blog I thought it would be appropriate to include a recipe that incorporates graham crackers (and that would make Sylvester Graham turn over on his grave).