Masticator’s Diet?
I’m sure you’ve heard that you should chew your food well before swallowing. But when Horace Fletcher, AKA the Great Masticator, started suggesting in 1895 that everyone should chew more, he may have exaggerated! He believed that “the most important part of nutrition is the right preparation of food in the mouth for future digestion.”
This meant chewing food up to 100 times a minute, making it a liquid so gross you no longer wanted to swallow it. The practice earned the moniker “Fletcherism,” which meant that you could eat anything you wanted, just as long as you chewed what you were eating until it became fluid. This practice became so popular that people would time each other at dinner parties.
