MASTICATION.

The stomach has no teeth. Teeth were the product of necessity. They were placed in the mouth by nature for the specific purpose of emulsifying food, so that it could be absorbed by the body. This process we call digestion.

Food that is not thoroughly pulverized by mastication must be reduced to solution by the stomach and the other digestive organs. If it be such material as the gastric juice will not dissolve, then it must be disposed of by disintegration, which starts with fermentation. This is the genesis of nearly all indigestion and intestinal disorders.

Fermentation changes food from a life-giving to a life-destroying substance. It generates a poisonous gas which is absorbed by the system and which preys upon the red corpuscles of the blood, lowering the vitality of every organ of the body.

This is only one of the many evils that result from imperfect mastication. A whole book could be written and the subject not exhausted—in fact, a very admirable work has been written by Mr. Horace Fletcher called “The A B Z of Our Own Nutrition,” devoted almost entirely to the subject of mastication. Under the heading of “Some Pertinent Questions” he suggests that the reader interrogate himself as follows: “Were I an iron and steel automobile instead of a flesh and blood automobile, which I really am, could I get a license for myself as a chauffeur to run myself with safety, based upon my knowledge of my own mechanism and the theory and development of my powers?”

Nature refuses to create and keep healthful any part of the anatomy or member of the body which is not used. Allow the arm to rest in a sling for a few months, and nature will cease to feed it, and it will become feeble, emaciated and almost useless.

Nature is a perfect economist. If the teeth are not used, she will refuse to keep them in repair; she will allow them to decay. She presumes that you do not need them because you have refused to put them to that use for which they were created. So long as people subsist upon soft, cooked, mushy foods, they cannot expect to have good teeth. This is one of the greatest arguments against the baneful habit of cooking and in favor of elementary foods.

Nature produces no food that should be swallowed without mastication, when eaten in its elementary state. She produces no soup trees, gravy vines, mush plants or cook stoves. Elementary food must be masticated. Thorough mastication will develop numerous flavors in foods that are a revelation in enjoyment to those who live upon them.

The majority of people cheat and dull the keenest sense of taste and defeat the primary purposes of nature by doing as others do, viz.: yielding to their hurried environment. The most delicious flavors of foods are developed by long mastication, which gives the saliva time enough to act upon their chemical properties and begin the process of changing and digesting them.

For instance, the changing of starch into dextrine and grape sugar is the first process of digestion; if done by mastication it develops a most delicious taste. If this most important function is not performed in the mouth by the act of mastication, the taste-buds are not only robbed of their rights, but extra labor is put upon the stomach, and the process of digestion much retarded and made more difficult.

Perfect mastication is the surest means of avoiding the habit of over-eating, which is so disastrous to the health and so common among civilized people. Every pennyweight of food taken into the stomach more than is necessary becomes at once a leaden load upon the body. It is converted into a poison. It so over-burdens the excretory organs that they become torpid and diseased and Bright’s disease, constipation, and the long train of evils that follow are the result.

Not long since, we dined with some friends whose knowledge of the culinary art was very highly developed. From memory we made an inventory of the quantity of food consumed by one of the most advanced disciples of French cookery; and according to our best calculations if the same quantity of material had been eaten in its elementary state and thoroughly masticated it would have taken about thirty-one hours’ continuous chewing to have disposed of the cargo.

The only excuse nature offers to man for creating him is that she gives him liberty and the means of securing his happiness and contentment. Yet nearly everything he does with reference to his physical structure seems to be especially designed to defeat this purpose.

There is a great deal of pleasure to be gained from eating, but when our highly civilized man comes to perform this very important function, he shovels in the provender with one hand while he makes out a mortgage or figures per cent. with the other. The result is that he gets no happiness from the mortgage or per cent., but a great deal of unhappiness from the provender; therefore, at the age of forty the majority of men stand dejected and defeated, while half the amount of study bestowed upon themselves and the inexorable laws of nature that they have given to the foibles of fashion or the fight for food would have brought health and abundant vitality up to and even beyond the century mark.

Old age is the most valuable period of life. When the strife and chase is ended we stand before our fellows with accumulated knowledge, with no ambition to serve except the common good, which should be given to the world in exchange for what Mother Nature has given to us.