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brought New Church vegetarianism to the United States when he immigrated to Philadelphia in 1817. Metcalfe practiced homeopathic medicine and helped start the American health reform movement. As we saw, George Washington died in 1799, and that marked the beginning of a real rejection of established medicine and its bleedings and purges. Opiates were one alternative; letting nature take its course was another. Metcalfe and other reformers can be said to have exploited the vacuum in medical authority, claiming that they could make you healthy and happy through purity. They rejected opiates and advised helping nature take its course through prohibitions: no meat, no smoke, no liquor. It was Metcalfe who converted Sylvester Graham, and over the next decades, Graham forever marked the American concept of healthy living. You can’t get very far in a movement that says only to reject things. Graham was first and foremost antisex, but he came up with something to say yes to, something he said would do us positive good.

Sylvester Graham championed homegrown, whole-grain, home-baked bread. If you couldn’t grow your own grain, find grain farmed nearby, as local as possible; and for the magic to really work, the dough should be kneaded by the palms, fingers, and fists of the woman who gave birth to you. Again, what gives pause is not that one man would come up with such a thesis, but rather that America accepted it as a viable approach to happiness: Mom’s tough-grain bread instead of sex. Graham’s doctrine was powerful in part because it came at a time when there was widespread distrust of medicine and in part because it seemed to fit with the lifestyle of the times. Early American immigrants came from places where breakfast was greasy and meaty. A lot of them were farmers in the old country and they worked hard, got through cold nights, and ate lard in the morning so they could do it all again. When they came to the young United States they were astounded by the abundance of food and for breakfast set sideboards crammed with various and plainly cooked meats. As life in the United States grew more urbanized, these heavy breakfasts were called into question.

Sylvester Graham wrote extended descriptions of his mother’s bread and about the taste of the grain harvested on his family’s farm, and he developed a more general theory, taking in all bread, baked by all mothers. “There was,” he wrote, “a natural sweetness and richness in it which made it always desirable; and which we cannot now vividly recollect without feeling a strong desire to partake again of such bread as our mothers used to make for us in the days of our childhood.”1 It is a pretty story, but there is something terribly wrong with it. Sylvester was only two years old when his father died at age seventy-four, and he was only six when the state declared his mother mad and took Sylvester out of her custody. A boy whose father dies when he is two wins the Oedipal struggle before it happens. It might seem to the baby that his desire for all his mother’s attention may have killed Dad. Then, to have her taken away when the boy was six—the adult Graham was going to have some issues. This was the man who brought America’s attention to the healthful properties of Mother’s sweet, coarse bread and advocated total sexual abstinence. He was also against meat, alcohol, coffee, tea, opiates, and tobacco.

During the terrible and terrifying cholera epidemics of the 1830s, Graham promised protection against the disease if you were sexually abstinent and followed his grainy diet. He would go around the country lecturing about the evils of the orgasm and the blessings of bread. Sometimes these talks were so racy that he preferred to deliver them to single-sex audiences. Sometimes that wasn’t enough. In the middle of a cholera scare in Boston, Graham advertised a lecture for women on protective health and was later mobbed—not for hucksterism, but for lecturing a female audience about masturbation. Graham said masturbation was bad, of course; all sexuality was, according to him. But he said