Yet few people will acknowledge to this bad habit. It is only when they are persuaded to take special notice of their manner of eating that they can be convinced of the fact. They resent the imputation that they are eating incorrectly. “We always live on plain, healthy food,” they say. Quite so; but the healthiest food can become a menace if taken in the wrong fashion. They scoff at the people who go in for a number of courses calling them gourmands. Yet many a man who takes a simple dinner, meat and vegetables followed by pudding, actually takes more than those who indulge in a greater variety of courses, but much smaller ones.
Strange to say, many people who often suffer from indigestion after their simple fare at home can go through an hotel menu without any bad after-effects. It is because the latter provides a greater number of intervals. When people are taking their two-course dinner in their own homes they are eating all the time, except for the interval between the meat and the sweet course. The action of the stomach is very much like that of a concertina. It needs to contract and expand regularly, and if little interval is allowed to elapse, it does not have the chance of doing so.
This concertina motion also demands an interval between the separate bites, and it gets it if the diner has company, and is obliged to converse during the meal. If it is eaten in silence, as happens in the case of those condemned to live alone, these intervals are lacking. In such a case the only remedy is to be found in reading a book or paper while taking the meal. It requires a tremendous force of will for a man to eat carefully and slowly when alone. He gets tired of the sound of his own jaws. If he is occupied in reading, he is much more likely to take his food in a more leisurely manner.
There is no habit more difficult to eradicate than this of rapid eating, and it needs constant care and attention, and we might add “practice,” to get rid of it. The point is to avoid drinking too much liquid with the meal, and never to drink until the food has been swallowed. Otherwise it is washed down before it is in a fit state.
It is many years since a well-known physician advocated the custom of taking thirty-two bites at each mouthful before swallowing it. He probably selected this figure as representing the total number of teeth in the adult jaws. Yet twenty-two would probably do as well. It does not follow that if this plan is adopted we shall have to go on counting at each meal for the remainder of our lives. The habit of mastication would soon become so automatic that we should not need to think about it at all.