Among the Intellectualoids/Health Food Awakenings
Klepp, Lawrence
AMONG THE INTELLECTUALOIDS HEALTH FOOD AWAKENINGS If anyone is to be honored as the founding father of the health food movement, it probably should be the Rev. Sylvester W. Graham, a Presbyterian...
...the inventor of the original Graham cracker...
...The death from malnutrition of a 24-year-old New Jersey woman who had followed this phase of the diet for nine months seems to have retarded its general acceptance...
...Lascivious thoughts, followed by onanism, are the legitimate out-come of a sex precocity forced by unwise feeding...
...he recommended, in addition to vegetarianism, cold showers as a preventive measure...
...Tilden, who late in the nineteenth century taught that pies, cakes, chewing gum, and certain combinations of foods (e.g., starch and protein, as in a cheese sandwich or meat and potatoes) cause fermentation in the digestive system, which in turn gives rise to evil thoughts and deeds...
...They began the day at dawn with a breakfast of dry wheatcakes and water and proceeded to their work in the fields, doing without the use of either farm animals or manure on moral grounds...
...Some admit fish but ban bananas...
...Vitamins, commonly priced at three or four times the cost of manufacture, sell briskly in megadoses...
...others seeking to abolish closed windows...
...In its highest and purest stage it rules out everything but brown rice and tea, but by that point such an exquisite balance of yin and yang is attained that the body, through a sort of spiritual grace, is enabled to manufacture for itself the numerous vitamins missing from the rice and tea...
...Then the sectarian spirit will presumably seek out some other apparently innocuous activity to interfere with...
...At about the same time the Rev...
...Graham was annoying butchers and bakers, A. Bronson Alcott and eleven other Transcendentalists withdrew from the Brook Farm cooperative community because they found it too worldly and set up their own community, called Fruitlands...
...Some ten years ago, at the age of 72, while boasting on "The Dick Cavett Show" of the perfect health and prospects for extreme longevity conferred on him by health foods, he dropped dead of a heart attack (the show was never aired...
...others clamoring against sleeping late...
...By the fifties, health food stores, once confined to the vicinity of Hollywood and patronized mainly by retired Mid-westerners searching for pep and movie actors worried about their overtaxed libidos, began to appear elsewhere in the country...
...today there are 9,000...
...Consider also Professor Arnold Ehret (1866-1922), founder of Ehret-ism, or the Mucusless Diet...
...Some began advocating letting the forest grow back and living entirely on wild berries...
...He was also one of the first theorists to connect onanism with creeping dementia...
...Some denounce eggplant, tomatoes, and potatoes as poisonous...
...now it is an apocalypse of cancer and malnutrition...
...Then the threat was the end of the world and hellfire...
...They blamed everything from crime to humorless-ness on vitamin deficiencies...
...A diet mainly of fruit and vegetables, which happens to be the regimen followed by Adam and Eve in the Garden, would cure humanity of its fallen and ailing condition...
...Once again, the enthusiasm will gradually fade out as both hopes and fears prove groundless...
...He held that because of such mucus-forming foods as meat, eggs, milk, cheese, nuts, and white bread, "life is a tragedy of nutrition...
...In his words, "The magic formula for 'Heaven on Earth' must read like this: 'Eat your way into Paradise physically.'" The mucusless "diet of Paradise," he concluded, would not only get rid of "worry, disease, sorrow, hate, fight, and murder," but would also do away with "masturbation, night emissions, and prostitution.'' The discovery of vitamins early in the twentieth century made succeeding health-food evangelists somewhat more practical and clinical in their prescriptions and promises, but the note of uplift remained...
...others allow almost anything so long as it is not cooked...
...Meat, he declared, caused constipation and sexual excess, both subjects about which he had strong feelings...
...It was the onset of winter, however, that proved their undoing...
...But it wasn't until the late sixties that the health food movement really mushroomed...
...Lelord Kordel wrote Eat Your Troubles Away...
...In 1965 there were roughly 800 such stores in the country...
...Graham traveled about the country fervently preaching against white bread, meat, spices, and spiritous liquors...
...Sylvester W. Graham, a Presbyterian clergyman best known as Lawrence Klepp lives in New York and is writing a book about eccentric religious sects...
...Some shun dairy products...
...The health food enthusiasm as it has developed since the sixties bears a striking resemblance to the Great Awakenings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries...
...Health food has become a $2-billion-a-year industry...
...As he put it, "Go back of all rottenness in domestic, church, social, and political life, to the kindergarten of crime, there disease-producing table habits and all social crimes, in miniature, will be found...
...New, ever more esoteric supplements are introduced at great velocity...
...by Lawrence Klepp Thus dietary reform had from the start an intimate connection with moral uplift and spiritual endeavor...
...Gayelord Hauser began preaching the virtues of such "wonder foods" as brewer's yeast, blackstrap molasses, yogurt, and other eventual staples of the movement...
...Among the latest of these elixirs are spirulina, octacosanol, and glucomannan ("ancient weight-loss secret of the Orient...
...others against sleeping on one's back...
...today there are 135 in Manhattan alone...
...Then the hope was salvation through grace and eternal bliss in heaven...
...The gospel was spread by radio and television...
...In 1963 there were perhaps ten health food stores in all of New York City...
...Prevention magazine, consisting of militantly cheerful articles promoting assorted supplements ("It's Time To Get Into Zinc Sync") and strident advertisements offering the same pills and potions, has reached a circulation of 2.5 million, in spite of the somewhat dampening fate of its founder, J.I...
...Religion has always meddled with food, but what has distinguished the health food movement is a tendency to consider food morally potent in itself, producing virtue or depravity according to its nature...
...Consider, for instance, the Macrobiotic (i.e., "long-life") Diet, devised by Georges Ohsawa, who himself died at the inconclusive age of 73...
...others, particularly zealous, advocate living entirely on fruit...
...There they refrained from not only meat but also butter, eggs, milk, cheese, tea, coffee, rice, and molasses...
...Then we can have yet another Great Awakening...
...If less preoccupied with onanism, they still regarded food as the key not only to health but to a sort of strenuous idealism as well...
...During this same period, hundreds of thousands of Americans have converted to vegetarianism, and dozens of other food sects and subsects have emerged, each with its own peculiar taboos...
...Rodale...
...They had also renounced wool clothing, leather shoes, and the burning of oil or tallow candles, and after a number of long, cold, dark winter nights they concluded that transcending the world was best done back in Boston...
...At least one man also refused to eat any root that grew downward instead of aspiring upward toward the sun...
...There are many possibilities, but my own suggestion would be sleep-some sects.preaching against sleeping on one's stomach...
...now it is salvation through whole grains and living to age 127 in some organic elysium...
...During the 1840s, the Rev...
...In the 1920s Bernard MacFadden promised vitality and optimism through the inges-tion of simple, natural foods, fasting, and (in the case of women) the renunciation of high-heeled shoes...
...So often did he extol daily bowel movements that the newspapers began referring to him as the Peristaltic Persuader...
...Other evangelists followed in their footsteps...
...Like them, it is compounded of extravagant fears and hopes, both whipped up by professional preachers...
...some denouncing rising early...
...Most of these sects promise not only health but also spiritual fringe benefits...
...The relentlessly optimistic and slightly paranoid books of Adele Davis converted multitudes...
...Consider, for instance, Dr...
...others, still more zealous, teach that ideally one ought to be adequately nourished by breathing deeply...
...others require them...
...some opposed to leaving the window open...
...Since they also believed that weeds had as much right to grow as their crops, the farm wasn't very successful...
Vol. 16 • December 1983 • No. 12
