The Montgomery advertiser., 1904-04-23
TO CHEW, OR NOT TO CHEW.

| The scientists have theory, which may O; may not be sound. that when any por- | ton of the human anatomy ceases en- | tirely to be used it will finally disappear. ot course the teeth disappear in old age. or from disease, or for other reasons. but I the young still possess good ones and we presume always will unless human be- ings discontinue their use.
 And that seems to be what modern methods are leading up to. The best in- foImed physiologists are agreed on the fact that chewing the food is an aid to digestion, and the longer the food Is cEewed, in reason, the more readily and | thoroughly 1t Is digested. But the ten dency now, and it IS becoming almost uni- versal is to prepare food in such manner that it requires no mastication, and in a | great many cases no cooking is required. It is not matter of surprise to find grocerymen kicking at the new order of l things, as one in Minneapolis does in his local paper. He says:
 Some of my customers have about quit buying flour; they say that all the ele- ments of wheat are Iound in their Plum pcza. They don't want any beans or peas or rice or cornmeal or potatoes or turnips-these would nave to be digested, and some folks would raher trade their 3stomachs for a Chicago factory and eat | 'pre-dlgested foods! Who's going to buy dried apples, evaporated apples, dried peaches, canned peaches. or canned fruit Of any kind. If ne thinks he can get | whole orchard all ready to swallow at one-third the price of prunes? If this thing keeps on I'll quit groceries and start food store-I didn't say feed store! I'll make a deal with one of our niliers. and put on luncheon foods and dinner foods, as well as breakfast foodsi III grind up burdocks, red ink and pop corn, and sell substitute for potatoes aud roast. beef! Why hire cook or keep kitchen; vixen all the family meals can | be prepared on radiator or upon the I rarlor stove?
 Perhaps this man puts 1t rather strong ly, but what he complains of is becomin { quite common in all parts of the United States, at least. In some form or othef
 practically everything we eat is pre- rared for eating and in many cases IS "pre edigestedH so that all we have to do is to swallow a tabloid or small dis.' of some preparation and go about our business. No cooking. no chewing, no di-
 gesting-just swallow 1t and that ends it.
 They tell us that food can be so ple- pared beforehand that it will not require to be cooked or chewed, and that it will
 be digested in half the time that is oT-
 dinarily required. If that Is true, aid 1t
 is kept up, will not both teeth and diSeS- two organs go out of use?
 F There Is mo doubt that there are many cases where prepared and condensed foods Twin be really useful For soldiers oil
 long marches, for travellers in many Hes ses, for those about embarking on long
 voyages to unknown countries, food may be. put up so 1t will occupy much smaller , space and be of much less weight, but will not require cooking and will be at all times ready for use. This is all true enough, but are we to have no more cooks, no more elaborate dinners and suppers, 10 more well cooked break lasts? Are we to do nothing but sit down at the table, open a few cans of pre- 1 pared grub and swallow it like we were So many fowls? That seems to be hark- ing back to the beginning of things, or even further. We might as we'll do away with teeth, and largely with stom- achs.
 But now comes a French scientist with an evident determination to put spoke in the wheel of the prepared food fel- lows He takes the position that the pre- pared and predigested foods are largely humbugs; or. rather, that they are bluffs. In other words while they may not be actually hurtful they are of little value. As. he argues, they perform about the same function that a stimulant does when the body is exhausted-give temporary relief As a drink of brandy for ex- ample given to a starving or exhausted man will strengthen him for a little while, so a meal of prepared food will gues that 1t would be just as logical to keep giving the starving man brandy and nothing else as it is to expect to keep up the strength of man or woman by feeding on the foods now so generally used There may be something in what he says, and there can be little doubt that the fad for prepared foods has gone too far. Such grub is very handy at times and in cases where the teeth have
 temporarily or finally gone out of busi-
 ness 1t is reasonable to suppose that
 food can be so prepared as to answer all purposes without masticatlon. For those who are blessed with good teeth the old way of cooking and chewing fills all the requirements.