The Graham diet was a 19th-century dietary regimen devised by the American Presbyterian minister Sylvester Graham — inventor of the graham cracker — preaching vegetarianism, whole grains, and strict temperance. The diet was wholly vegetarian, allowed fats only in small quantities, and forbade alcohol, caffeine, spices, and meat, which Graham believed inflamed base appetites. Followers ate coarse wholemeal bread — graham bread — as the staff of life. Part health reform, part moral crusade, the movement attracted devoted boarding houses and adherents, and it seeded ideas that echo in modern wholefood and vegetarian movements. Graham’s blend of nutrition and puritanism now reads as quaint, but his championing of whole grains was ahead of its time.