Bring back our graham crackers

Published 8:56 am Thursday, July 10, 2025

By Bonnie Brown

Columnist

What are your favorite food combinations?  Strawberry and chocolate, hot dog and mustard, peanut butter and jelly?  One of my very favorites is Oreos with milk! 

We recently discovered a particularly creamy, delicious sherbert in the grocery store. My favorite combination would be sherbert with graham crackers.  So, you can imagine my disappointment when the newly-purchased graham crackers tasted like cardboard!

Who decided that the graham cracker should be brittle, thin, and have no flavor?  Honestly, I haven’t eaten graham crackers for a long time, but my recollection is that they were thicker, softer, and sweeter.  Is my memory correct or am I trying to revamp the simple graham cracker?

Has the FDA inserted themselves into the simple graham cracker?  They have been meddling with lots of food additives and such that are harmful to us.  I get that.  I don’t want to ingest food that contains additives that are harmful, but many of these foods have been around for a long while before it was decided that they contained harmful ingredients that were not essential to the product.  Can we expect all the colorful food to go beige and bland?

I have read that RFK, Jr. is cracking down on “junk foods” such as frosted breakfast pastries (Pop-Tarts), pizza rolls, Instant Noodle Cups with Powdered Flavor Packs (my lunch for years as I sat at my desk in my office). Creamy packaged pasta sides (frozen alfredo linguini), canned spaghetti products, among many others.  My kids grew up eating Pop-Tarts each morning for breakfast, and who hasn’t had Spaghetti-O’s?

It’s bad enough that the FDA is continually messing with our favorite food content.  I am more interested in reading the restaurant reviews to see who passed the inspections.  I would like to think that each establishment practices safely handling and storage of food.  I’d also like to think all the surfaces are clean and that the cooks, waiters, and everyone involved in my food preparation practice good personal hygiene and take great care when handling and preparing the food.  We’ve all heard the horror stories of the person spitting into the dish/plate of food being prepared for the customer.  

Back to the graham cracker.  I found an article written by David Carroll, Chattanooga-based radio and TV broadcaster, where he too laments the changes to the modest graham cracker.  He was most concerned about the reduction in size and also mentioned the now smaller Pop-Tarts.  Mr. Carroll also commented that “We are now apparently paying for extra air in the potato chip bags.”  And might I add that the bag of chips now costs north of $6!  

Graham crackers are used to make pie crusts.  Every recipe calls for the addition of sugar to the ground graham crackers to make a worthy piecrust!  And the graham cracker is a key ingredient in S’mores in addition to just being a yummy snack.  One of my favorites is to cover the graham cracker with cream cheese.  Very tasty!

So, wake up Nabisco, Keebler, and Honey Maid!  Reinstate the full flavor, width, and texture to the lowly graham cracker.  I don’t think even RFK, Jr. would object.  Especially if he had a taste test of the “before” and “after” versions of this unpretentious snack!