In “Manly Health and Training” (1858),  a series of newspaper articles on the topics of exercise and healthy eating practices, Whitman preached that moral character develops from a well-maintained physique and a healthy diet.  “Manly Health and Training” was inspired by America’s first health reform movement, which was set in motion by the reformist atmosphere that also sparked the temperance movement, homeopathic medicine, Spiritualism, and Leaves of Grass.  Learn how early food activists such as Sylvester Graham (creator of ‘Graham bread’, the healthy forerunner of the graham cracker) expressed themselves through fresh, unadulterated flour in comparable ways to Whitman’s use of fresh, unadulterated language from award-winning baker Graison Gill and Stephen Jones, Director of the Bread Lab at Washington State University.

Stephen Jones is a wheat breeder and the Director of the Bread Lab at Washington State University. Stephen has a Ph.D. in Genetics from the University of California at Davis and teaches graduate courses in advanced classical genetics and in the history and ethics of genetics. His first wheat crop was on five acres at Chico State University’s student farm in 1977. Together with his graduate students he breeds wheat and other grains for local uses to be grown on small farms in the coastal West, the upper Northeast and other regions of the country. The Bread Lab is a combination think tank and baking laboratory where scientists, bakers, chefs, farmers, maltsters, brewers, distillers and millers experiment with improved flavor, nutrition and functionality of regional and obscure wheats, barley, other small grains and beans.

Graison Gill is the owner of Bellegarde Bakery in New Orleans. Graison has been baking professionally for eleven years and was trained at the San Francisco Baking Institute under Michel Suas and Frank Sally. Graison’s passion for bread stems from the craft’s intricacies and interactions with the elements of fire, water, and fermentation. In 2020 he was a nominee for the Best Baker in America by the James Beard Foundation.

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