Читать книгу Food and Flavor: A Gastronomic Guide to Health and Good Living - Henry T. Finck - Страница 20

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There is an old German proverb to the effect that if food is properly chewed it is half digested: Gut gekaut ist halb verdaut.

This is literally true, but in England and America, although physicians and others have long known it to be so, it was not impressed on the general public's attention until the newspapers began to comment—some seriously, others facetiously—on the statement that Gladstone, in 1848, adopted certain rules for chewing food to which he ever after adhered and to which some observers attributed his remarkable physical vigor. "Previous to that," said the "Pall Mall Gazette," "he had always paid great attention to the requirements of nature, but at that date he laid down as a rule for his children that thirty-two bites should be given to each mouthful of meat and a somewhat lesser number to bread, fish, etc."

Now Gladstone was wrong in suggesting that meat needed more munching than bread. The stomach takes care of meat if it is not swallowed in too large chunks; whereas bread, as well as potatoes, together with oatmeal and other cereals, no matter how soft, should be kept in the mouth some time to enable the saliva to partly digest them and prepare them for the lower viscera.

This error, however, did not detract seriously from the value of Gladstone's directions. The main thing was that his "home rule" called the attention of two nations to the unwisdom of bolting food and the advantage to health resulting from keeping it for some time in the mouth. In its far-reaching effect on millions in two worlds it was perhaps of greater and more lasting value than any of his acts as a statesman.

This assertion gains strength from the fact that it was Gladstone's example that started Horace Fletcher on his road as a reformer of the foolish eating habits of Americans, and others, but Americans in particular.

He has himself related (in the "Ladies' Home Journal" for September, 1909) how it was that his thoughts were first directed into this channel through an epicurean friend who had a snipe estate among the marshlands of Louisiana and a truffle preserve in France, and who faithfully followed Gladstone's rules in regard to the thorough chewing of food. In 1898 Mr. Fletcher began to work out the problem for himself, to the great advantage of his health.

At the age of forty he was an old man, on the way to a rapid decline. His hair was white, he weighed 217 pounds, he was harrowed by indigestion, and had "that tired feeling." At the age of sixty, after eleven years of experiment, he had reduced his weight to 170 pounds, felt strong and well, and had forgotten what it was to have the tired feeling.

His experience thus was similar to that of the Italian nobleman, Luigi Cornaro (1467-1566), who was a dissipated wreck at the age of forty, but who by reforming his way of eating, regained his health and lived to be nearly a hundred. After his eighty-third year he wrote four treatises on diet and longevity; his autobiography has passed through more than forty English editions. His wisdom might be summed up in these words: "As you grow older eat less."

Horace Fletcher is the Cornaro of the nineteenth century. Everybody who ever "knows he has a stomach" should read one or both the books he has written on this subject: "The A B-Z of Our Own Nutrition," and "The New Glutton or Epicure." The first named owes its value largely to the fact that it includes reprints of valuable papers by eminent men of science and physicians, the investigations of most of whom were in part prompted, or inspired, by Mr. Fletcher's writings. The most important of these are Dr. Harvey Campbell's Observations on Mastication, and Prof. Pawlow's articles on Psychic Influence in Digestion.

Most persons labor—or act as if they labored—under the delusion that the mouth was made chiefly for the ingestion of food and that the sole use of saliva is to lubricate it so that it can be easily and quickly swallowed. Mr. Fletcher did not discover the fact that the mouth is also a most important organ of digestion, with the aid of saliva; but he emphasized this important fact in his writings as no other writer had ever done, proclaiming it from the housetops till thousands began to listen and heed and learn and benefit by his preaching; and therein lies the importance of his name in the history of dietetic reform.

The gist of his doctrine may be given in a few words: keep all food (soft as well as hard, liquid as well as solid, moist as well as dry) in the mouth and chew it till it has become thoroughly mingled with the saliva, has lost all its flavor, and is ready to disappear down the throat without an effort at swallowing. Gladstone's directions in regard to thirty-two masticatory movements are all right for some foods, but others require no more than twenty, while for some (onions) seven hundred hardly suffice to remove the odor and make them digestible. Unless the mouth thus does its work, the lower digestive tract has to do it at ten times the expenditure of vital force, and the result is dyspepsia.

HORACE FLETCHER

Never, surely, was preaching more needed than these sermons of Horace Fletcher to the victims of America's national scourge of chronic indigestion.

It cannot be denied that there is a considerable amount of questionable faddism and exaggeration in his doctrines. He, himself, frankly apologizes for such details in them as "may suggest the scrappiness and extravagance of an intemperate screed," on the ground that "so-called screeds sometimes attract attention where sober statement fails to be heard"; which is unfortunately true.

Many of Fletcher's followers accept his exaggerations along with the sound parts of his doctrines. They endorse the statements that he, "in inaugurating the chewing reform has done more to help suffering humanity than any other man of the present generation"; or, as another writer, a physician, put it in a letter to him: "What you have done to unfold physiologic mastication means more for human weal than all the mere medical prescribes have given the world from Adam to the present day."

It cannot be denied that medical and other scientific writers were culpable in not enlightening the public on these important matters, and it serves them right, therefore, if Fletcher has got the credit and the fame for doing this. It is estimated that there are already more than 200,000 "Fletcherites" in the United States. In the hope of increasing their number, in the rational sense of the word, let me dwell on a few of the things in which, in my opinion, Mr. Fletcher is right, and some of those beside which readers of his books will do well to place question marks. In particular, I wish to call further attention to his valuable remarks on the necessity of doing more "mouth work" than most of us do, and on the importance of agreeable Flavor in food as an aid to digestion.

Many thousands of otherwise healthy persons bewail the fact that they have to avoid some of their favorite dishes because they find them indigestible. To these individuals Fletcherism, as endorsed by Dr. Campbell, brings the cheering message that they can eat anything they please provided they give it the proper mouth treatment.

Inasmuch as individuals differ in regard to the supply of saliva, no general rules can be laid down as to how many bites any particular mouthful requires. One person may dispose of a morsel of bread in thirty mastications while another may need fifty before it has disappeared down the throat without an effort at swallowing. Mr. Fletcher once had a tussle with a challot, or young onion, which "required 722 mastications before disappearing through involuntary swallowing." But when it was down it left no odor upon the breath and created no disturbance whatever.

Could anything more triumphantly proclaim the wonders of Fletcherism?

Here is another miracle: "Abundant experiment has been made by those to whom 'Boston brown bread' was formerly little less than a poison, to prove the assertion that, sufficiently mixed with saliva, it is perfectly digestible and that the delicious taste of the bread after forty or fifty bites—about one-half minute—gets sweeter and sweeter, and attains its greatest sweetness and most delicate taste at the very last, when it has dissolved into liquid form and most of it has escaped into the stomach."