One of the objections usually provoked by the suggestion that all
tasteless residue remaining in the mouth after the taste or nutriment
has been dissolved out of it should be removed is generally expressed
in this wise, "How is it possible to remove refuse from the mouth while
eating without appearing disgusting to others at table? You have to
swallow things to get rid of them."
This is merely a bugbear prejudice. It has no good reason.
Do you not remove cherry pits, grape skins, the shell of lobster, bone,
etc., when you encounter them? Then why not remove the fibrous matter
found in tough lean meat, the woody fibre of vegetables or anything
rejected by instinctive desire to discard it after taste has been
exhausted, and which is a protection provided by beneficent Nature?
In well selected and well cooked food there is little found that the
juices of the mouth in connection with the teeth cannot take care of
and prepare so as to be acceptable to Nature's Food Filter.
If fibre is found in the food it can be put upon the fork in the same
manner that a cherry pit is usually handled and transferred to the
plate without observation.
Another fancied objection to thorough mastication is that it interferes
with the sociability of a meal.
This is also a senseless bugbear. It is true that one cannot converse
freely with large morsels of food in the mouth. It is also true that
it is nothing less than a _gluttonous_ custom to greedily take a big
mouthful of food, and, if accosted with a question, to bolt it in order
to answer.
It will be found easy to carry on conversation without disagreeable
interruption and yet follow Nature's demands in properly masticating
food by taking small morsels into the mouth. It will be found also to
add to the real pleasure of eating, and eventually will become a habit
by choice.
Another objection raised by those who are afflicted with the habit of
gluttony is the lack of time permitted by their business occupation.
The time needed to appease the natural appetite of a hearty and active
man, to compensate for the daily waste and keep the weight at normal,
is from thirty to forty-five minutes for twenty-four hours.[8] This
requires attention and industrious mastication. Divided into three
meals it is less than a quarter of an hour for each meal.
[Footnote 8: The actual time required by the author during the Yale
tests to secure full alimentation, maintain weight, and fully appease
a "workingman's appetite," was from twenty-four to twenty-six minutes,
divided into two meals for each day. The common habit is to bolt food
and waste time afterwards in torpid inactivity, while all the energy
is busy in the stomach and intestines trying to get rid of the great
excess loaded upon them.]
Epicurean habits, however, incline one away from three meals a day and
make two meals sufficient for ordinary activity.
One objector, on the spur of momentary discussion, claimed that in
travelling by railway the time allowed for eating would not permit
Epicurean methods.
The author arrived at Mobile, Ala., recently with a workingman's
appetite and had only twenty minutes in which to get off the train, on
again, and satisfy the appetite. There is an excellent lunch counter
now at Mobile, and on the counter there was a tempting array of things
to eat and drink. Appetite chose at once a fat, rich ham sandwich,[9]
a glass of creamy milk and a hexagonal segment of a mince pie. The
twenty minutes was ample time for disposing of the sandwich and the
milk, and meantime the mince pie had been wrapped in silk paper and
placed in a paper bag to furnish Epicurean enjoyment for twenty miles
on the road, enhanced by the beauty of a panoramic landscape.
[Footnote 9: Five years of Epicurean enjoyment and study of the food
instincts and food economics have taught the author to like many things
better than slices of dead pig sandwiched between slices of delicious
bread. Vegetarian extremist and faddist the author is not, but an
attention to natural leadings inclines one away from dead meat, which
is believed to induce much uric acid, and in favour of first-hand food
elements as fresh from the heart and the breast of Mother Nature as
possible, leaving the second-hand, once-digested, already decaying,
natural food of the savage _carnivora_ and the emergency food of
savage man for emergency occasions or a vegetable famine. Much meat
excites lust, intemperance, and savagery in man and gives explosive,
non-enduring force. The question is, do we need such force in the
twentieth century, especially when we know that it tends to shorten
life and predispose to disease?]
If I had crammed the pie and the sandwich and the milk into my
stomach in seven or eight minutes, which, by actual observation, is
the gluttonous rate of despatching a station meal, I would have lost
two-thirds of nutriment, more than one-half of taste and would have
perhaps taken on twenty-four hours of discomfort, possibly inviting a
cold. I would have created an "open door" for any migrating microbes
that were floating about in my atmosphere looking for strained tissue
or fermenting food in which to build their disease nests.
Observation proves that you do not get much more nutriment out of your
food than saliva prepares in some way for digestion, gulp though you
may, but you can take in a load of disease possibilities in trying to
force the food past or otherwise evade proper salivation.