By Doug Pugh
In this complex, rapidly changing, and unpredictable world, do you find yourself in need of comfort? Are you having trouble finding it?
You’re not alone.
Things being what they are, I have started dunking again. I used to dunk both Oreo cookies and graham crackers, but sugar and calorie concerns now favor graham crackers alone.
It’s a pause that, for me, causes memories to roll, memories of sitting at a kitchen table with a box of Oreo cookies or a stack of pre-sectioned Nabisco Graham crackers, anticipating their enhancement from the creamy smoothness of a glass of milk.
Is the tension ebbing?
My cookie/cracker consumption would soon reach the limit of my stomach’s distention. Lately, I’ve been following a more moderate dunking course, savoring the calm but forgoing the discomfort of expansion.
Sylvester Graham developed the graham cracker in the mid-19th century, motivated by a search for nutritional value and biblical correctness.
Biblical correctness?
Sylvester preached that simple, bland food would control his and others’ carnal desires. His cracker recipe used water and coarsely ground unleavened whole-wheat flour. He would roll the dough, bake it without yeast or salt, and then bake it again. The result was no cookie.
But it failed to attract young people to the kitchen table.
Sylvester also avoided meat and alcohol, eschewed warm baths, slept with an open window in winter on a rock-hard mattress, and sanctioned sexual engagement for reproduction purposes only.
Later, commercial bakers got their hands on Graham’s recipe and changed it. Not only did they improve the recipe, they closed the window and took a warm bath.
Whole-wheat flour was still used, but it was enhanced with shortening, sugar, and salt. By 1898, the National Biscuit Company (Nabisco) produced a line of graham crackers so tasty they triggered runs on kitchen tables, resulting in multiple instances of abdominal distention.
However, Sylvester’s boxed-in approach, while less pervasive than it once was, is still a necessary ingredient; left to their own devices, graham crackers can be led astray by cheesecakes and seduced by s’mores.
That’s not all that went astray.
In 1981, Nabisco merged with Standard Brands to form Nabisco Brands.
In 1985, Nabisco Brands merged with R.J. Reynolds Tobacco to form RJR Nabisco.
In 1988, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, a private equity holding company, purchased Nabisco and spun off the tobacco business, leaving Nabisco Holdings.
In 2000, Phillip Morris acquired Nabisco Holdings and merged it with Kraft Foods.
In 2012, Kraft Foods split, and the portion that assumed Nabisco was renamed Mondelez International. Nabisco had developed Oreo cookies, so when Mondelez International acquired it, it acquired the two big-name dunking entities: Oreo cookies and Graham crackers.
You could say it has a monopoly on dunking.
Which prompts the question: “Who is getting dunked?”
Nabisco acquired the Jackson Cracker Company of Jackson, Michigan in 1919. In 1934, it changed the name of its cracker from Jackson to Ritz.
Why?
Well, it was a name they believed would appeal to folks living through the Great Depression by offering them a high-end “Ritzy” product, one augmented by an upscale promotional assurance: “A bite of the good life.”
A marketing technique no longer limited to crackers, and one that can be incorporated into a comfort-producing dunking regimen during depressing times: “Dunk for the good life”
I hope this helps.
Doug Pugh is a retired judge from northern Michigan. He and his wife winter on Fripp Island and are pleased to be there … when they are. He can be reached at pughda@gmail.com.