THE EATING ROOM
THE EATING ROOM
OTHER While waiting for the door to open to let the food pass from the stomach kitchen, let me tell you that the walls of the kitchen are covered with hundreds of little mouths; for you must remember this room is like no other that was ever made. These tiny mouths keep drinking the food which is digested, and it is taken into the blood through the tiny blood-vessels which cover the stomach.
At last comes the food which could not pass the door again, and this time it passes through into a long, narrow room, with walls quite like those of the kitchen. Sometimes a plum pit gets into the kitchen; the cook is unable to use it, and when it goes up to the door, it closes quickly, so it must stay where it is. Sometime after the door will open and let it through.
Helen: That is the same as though you should tell me I should not do a thing, and then, because I teased or coaxed, you should let me do what you had before said I should not.
Mother: Yes, that is the way with this door-keeper. But sometimes the door closes very tightly, and then there is trouble, for that which can not get through the second door must find its way back through the first. We should be very careful about swallowing large seeds of fruit, buttons, or anything that is hard and can not be digested. People are sometimes made very ill in this way. But now we will learn what is done in the second room.
Perhaps it might be called the “serving room;” for it is here the food is made ready for the eating room. Here we find two assistant cooks. The name of one is Pan-cre-at´ic Juice, and the other is called Bile. Each one has a room of his own. Pan-cre-at´ic Juice has his home in a room back of the kitchen, which is called the pancreas. Bile lives in the largest room in the body-house, which is called the liver.
The liver might be called a factory; for it has hundreds of little rooms in which Bile is made. It has a waiting room, called the gall, where Bile stays when he is not wanted. This tiny room is close to the liver, and from that Bile goes to the serving room. On the way he meets Pan-cre-at´ic Juice, and they go on to their work together.
Bile, like some other servants, is hard to please, and he will do only one kind of work. It is the duty of these cooks to finish up the work that Gastric Juice has begun. Bile will work with hardly anything but fats, and it is his work to make them into such tiny drops that they can be used in the body. He must also furnish part of the fuel to keep the body warm. He sometimes gets lazy or angry if the master of the house gives him too much work, or if he sends too much fat or sugar into the serving room. The master of the house tells his friends he is “bilious,” which means that Bile is out of temper and wants less hard work and more rest.
Percy: Is Pan-cre-at´ic Juice so particular as Bile?
Mother: No; he is much more obliging, and is willing to do anything that needs to be done. Together these helpers work over the food after it comes from the kitchen till it is very fine and creamy.
Amy: Does this room look like the kitchen?
Mother: The walls are very much the same, and they keep eating or sucking up the food that is wholly digested, much as a sponge sucks up water. A part is taken up this way and goes into the blood-vessels at once, but part is sent on to the eating room, where hundreds of little people are waiting for their breakfasts and dinners.
Helen: How does the eating room look?
Mother: This room is very narrow and about twenty feet long. You must not think it is a straight room twenty feet long, for it is not. At one side it is fastened to a thin band, and the band is gathered like a frill or ruffle, so the room, though it is folded over and over, never gets tangled. Perhaps I might say it is like a tube more than a room.
The little folks who eat here do not sit at tables as you do. They are fastened to the walls, so they are always in the same places. Another name for this room is the “small intestine.”
Elmer: I would like to see some of the little folks who eat there. How large are they?
Mother: They are so very, very small you could not see them unless you had a strong glass to help you. They stand up straight, like the soft, silky part of velvet or plush. They are called Villi.
As the food comes in from the serving room, another helper, called In-tes´ti-nal Juice, takes any part which the other servants have not finished as it passed through their rooms, and thus digestion is complete. The Villi soak the food up as it passes them, as a plant draws water and food from the ground.
Helen: But how does it all get into the blood?
Mother: I was just about to tell you that part of the story. You have seen little creeks, and you know they flow into larger ones, which form small rivers, and they, in turn, flow in some broad river toward the sea. So this creamy fluid which is sucked up by the Villi goes into tiny veins; these open into larger ones, till all flow in one stream about as big as a slate-pencil up to a large vein near the neck, and from there to the heart, where the stream is changed to blood, and is ready for use in the body. Part of the food takes another way to get to the heart. It goes first to the liver, which takes the part it needs, and the rest goes on to the heart.
Helen: Then all we eat finally gets into the blood.
Mother: No; there is always some part that can not be used. Passing through the eating room the waste is carried into a garbage box, called the colon, which should be emptied every day.
Now let us see if we can give the names of the different rooms a slice of bread passes through before it reaches the heart and becomes blood.
Elmer: First, the passage, which is the mouth, down the steep stairs or gullet, through the stomach kitchen, through the serving room, the eating room, or small intestine, and from there straight to the heart, or else by another road through the liver to the same place.
Mother: Very good. Now what juices make the bread ready to become blood.
Percy: First, the saliva in the mouth.
Amy: And gastric juice in the stomach.
Helen: Then bile from the liver, and pan-cre-at´ic juice from the pancreas.
Elmer: The last was the in-tes´tin-al juice.
Mother: That is right, and let me tell you that in our bodies about twenty pounds of juices are made every day. Now I think we can remember that the food passes through five rooms, and it takes five juices to make it into blood. Two of the juice family, which have the long names, in-tes´tin-al and pan-cre-at´ic, are willing to work on all parts of the food. The others work chiefly on one part only. Saliva digests starch. Bile works on fats. Gastric juice takes the part which is called al-bu´men.
“Behind the bread, the snowy flour;
Behind the flour, the mill;
Behind the mill, the growing wheat
Nods on the breezy hill;
Over the wheat is the glowing sun,
Ripening the heart of the grain;
Above the sun is the gracious God,
Sending the sunlight and the rain.”