TEACHING THE ART OF EATING.
It is not enough that girls and boys at school should be taught to cook; they should also learn how to eat.
Few learn this at home. They are usually taught table etiquette: that they must eat silently, and not take soup off the end of a spoon (though that is the only rational way of doing it) or put the knife into the mouth; but the infinitely more important art of mastication is entirely ignored.
The art of eating is a branch of physiology and should be taught in all schools by experts, the earlier the better. If it were thus taught the next generation of mothers and fathers would know that it is a crime to let their children swallow food, particularly milk and cereals and vegetables, before it has been kept for a while in the mouth to be mixed with saliva and thus made digestible.
Children (and most adults, too,) are like animals: give them something good to eat and they gulp it down eagerly and then look around for more to stuff into their unfortunate stomachs.
When I was a boy, a story in one of the readers, entitled "The Stomach's Complaint," made an indelible impression on my mind, and saved me many hours of the distress caused by overeating, eating too fast, or eating or drinking things too hot or too cold.
It should be indelibly impressed on all school children that gluttony is a vice which defeats its own end, and that by eating very slowly much more pleasure can be got from one mouthful than by bolting a whole plateful.
One stick of candy can be made to yield more "linked sweetness long-drawn-out" than a dozen sticks as usually devoured. Moreover, one stick will not cause hours of discomfort as the dozen sticks surely will; and, in addition, it will cost much less, thus leaving plenty of money to spend on other things. Surely this argument must appeal to all children who have brains enough to be worth schooling.
Every child should also be told over and over again, till the habit is formed, that the pleasure derived from candy and cake and all food can be vastly increased and intensified by consciously breathing out through the nose while eating (as explained on pages 62-3) and that this will be a further protection from indigestion.
If these truths were firmly impressed on all child minds, two-thirds of the minor ills of mankind would disappear in two generations, and most of the major maladies also; for let me say it once more, the stomach is the source of most preventable diseases.