Nutrition in Britain

Science, Scientists and Politics in the Twentieth Century

David Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136156823
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This volume brings together for the first time a collection of essays, based on original research, which focus on the history of nutrition science in Britain. Each chapter considers a different episode in the development and application of nutritional knowledge during the twentieth century. The topics covered include: the chewing cult of Horace Fletcher, dietetic education, the popularization of milk, the Dunn Nutritional Laboratory, and wartime involvement in policy making.
The selection of essays in Nutrition in Britain provide valuable new insights into the social processes involved in the production and application of scientific knowledge of nutrition. This book will be fascinating reading to historians of science or medicine, as well as to medical sociologists, nutritionists, home economists, health educators, food activists and anyone with a professional or general interest in food and nutrition.

1

Fletcherism

The Chew-Chew Fad of the Edwardian Era

L. Margaret Barnett

In January 1904, the editors of The Lancet took the unusual step of endorsing a dietetic fad. ‘Popular crazes in matters of medicine … are more often than not things to be deplored,’ they wrote. ‘If they are not actually harmful they are generally ridiculous, and if they are of no benefit to the general public assuredly they are, as a rule, of equally little advantage to the medical profession.’¹ This craze, however, was an exception. In the editors’ view ‘a more generally beneficial doctrine could hardly be chosen for the popular medical idol of the moment’.

The fad in question was Fletcherism, the brainchild of Horace Fletcher, a retired American businessman. People jokingly called it the ‘chew-chew cult’ because it involved chewing food excessively. Unlike a thirty-two-chew system Gladstone practised (one for every tooth), Fletcherism did not specify how many times to chew, just to masticate each mouthful until it was mixed thoroughly with saliva. Only then, said Fletcher, was food ‘chemically transformed from its crude condition into the … form that makes it possible of digestion and absorption … ‘.² Let doubters make a simple test, he urged. Insalivation turned starches into a type of sugar the body could readily use: chew bread into a cream and taste it become sweeter. Thus, ‘taste shows that a chemical process is going on’.³ Ignorance of this basic fact invited auto-intoxication, the much-feared Edwardian malady, since unmasticated ‘starchy foods – breads, for instance … pass unchanged into the intestinal tube; and simply decay there, creating noxious and poisonous products’.⁴ Milk and other liquid foods also needed careful treatment in the mouth. They were to be sipped, then ‘masticated’ by swishing them around until all taste was gone. ‘To swallow anything but pure water without tasting it into absorption produces a shock,’ Fletcher warned.⁵

Starting the digestive process in the mouth gave the body more time to absorb nutrients. Someone who wolfed a meal down in only seven or eight minutes would waste two-thirds of its value, but the Fletcherite could extract a full day’s nourishment from just thirty mouthfuls of bread.⁶ Most people could get by on one-third fewer calories. Unappreciative of growing knowledge about vitamins and minerals, Fletcher maintained that the quality of the diet depended more on how completely food was digested than on what one ate. His system ensured perfect nutritional equilibrium and was therefore ideal for both over- and under-eaters. The one remained well nourished while automatically reducing calories, the other derived more nourishment from a narrow diet.⁷

As to how much and how often to eat, let Nature decide: eat only when truly hungry, select what the body craves, and stop when saliva no longer flows freely. The body needs more food only when previous meals are digested, so fixed mealtimes should become a thing of the past. Many should find two meals sufficient. It was sometimes reported that Fletcher ate only once a day. In fact, he constantly nibbled on candy and fruit, took at least six lumps of sugar in his coffee, and enjoyed late-night suppers. There are many stories of him flouting gastronomic convention by satisfying his cravings. Once, at the plush Waldorf-Astoria in New York, five luncheon companions let him order for all. His selection: six pints of milk, a quart of cream, oysters, fried potatoes, and bread and butter. The waiter was described as stunned.⁸

The challenge for novice chewers was not heeding the appetite but keeping the food in the mouth long enough for chemical reaction to occur. Fletcher advised eating face-down so that the tongue hung perpendicularly. Then, let Nature take charge. Special taste buds in the mouth would test the food, and only when the mix was right would the ‘food gate’ open to allow automatic ingestion. Only the liquid was to be swallowed. Fibrous residues that resisted insalivation were ‘dangerous’ and should be spat out. The food gate, or ‘Nature’s Food Filter’, was Fletcher’s great discovery: before him, Fletcher claimed, physiologists did not know it blocked off the back of the throat while food was in the mouth.⁹ As one might imagine, Fletcherites at table were not an attractive sight. One contemporary wrote that they had ‘added a new horror to dining out’ and that ‘the best that can be expected from them is the tense and awful silence which always accompanies their excruciating tortures of mastication’.¹⁰ Franz Kafka’s father hid behind a newspaper at dinnertime to avoid watching the writer Fletcherise.¹¹ Even Horace Fletcher was seen eating ‘with glum and grim determination’ at Cambridge early in his dietetic career, although he later mastered the art of chewing cheerfully, thereby outwardly fulfilling a key dictum: ‘Do not eat when you are mad or sad; only when you are glad’.¹²

Despite the physical contortions and the inevitable check on conversation, the fad first appeared as ‘muncheons’ (munching luncheons) or ‘munching parties’. These affairs were co-ordinated by a master of ceremonies who, stopwatch in hand, timed the chewing of the first mouthful of food at each course and gave the signal to swallow – by ringing a bell, for example. This opener usually lasted an incredible five minutes and was intended to set a leisurely pace for the rest of the meal.¹³ Fletcher claimed that even Edward VII took part. Sir Thomas Barlow, the king’s physician, began recommending super-mastication to his patients after examining Fletcher during tests at Cambridge University.¹⁴ Muncheons swept upper-class circles in London in 1903 and spread to the social elites of America’s big cities the following year. They were still being held in Britain in 1906, as a cartoon in Punch reveals. ‘This is not a feast of “funeral baked meats”, ‘the caption read. The miserable-looking diners were ‘working out their own salivation’.¹⁵

Dietetics became a conversation piece in the early years of the century as news spread about laboratory discoveries in physiology and nutritional chemistry that were overturning time-honoured maxims. Fletcherism was only one of the faddist systems that surfaced during this period, and it was not even the only crank system concerned with reducing the amount of food eaten, as it shared some characteristics with the ‘fasting’ and ‘no breakfast’ fads. By the time Fletcherism came on the scene, ‘food reform’ was well entrenched in Britain, at least among the educated and well-off. The subject’s widespread appeal gave J. M. Barrie a smash hit when his comedy Little Mary opened in London in September 1903. In this play aristocratic dyspeptics are cured when told to cut down on food – the authority being Little Mary, at first thought to be a spirit medium, but revealed at the end of the play to be the stomach.¹⁶

By mid-1909, Fletcherism was reportedly the dietetic system most favoured by Britain’s shapers of opinion: ‘professors, lawyers, physicians, clergymen, editors, newspaper and magazine writers, philosophers, financiers, men of brains and energy, leaders in the various spheres of human activity’.¹⁷ However, although it won a respectable following in western Europe, notably in Italy, Denmark, Germany and Britain, and was known in Russia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Fletcherism never achieved the level of support it enjoyed in the United States. There the expression ‘to Fletcherise’ became a figure of speech applied to other activities besides eating, and in the inter-war period it was still used for ‘chew well’. American dictionaries began listing the term in 1913.¹⁸ In most places, the fad’s popularity had peaked by 1910. It still had followers when war broke out, but with Fletcher’s death in 1919, and more widespread knowledge of new nutritional principles after the war, only a few diehards such as Kafka remained faithful in the 1920s.

Fletcherism, Science and Medicine

Various factors contributed to the vitality of Fletcherism, only a few of which can be considered here. In Britain, defence in time of war played a part, and concern about national degeneration was also important. However, support by the scientific and medical communities was the essential element in Fletcherism’s success, the avenue by which it spread beyond Fletcher’s immediate circle, and the reason it first took root in Britain. Fletcher appreciated the potential of scientific and medical support from the start. If he were ever to be taken seriously, he later joked, he knew he must either become a physician himself or ‘go out and capture a doctor, cure him, and make him [his] megaphone’.¹⁹ Fletcher’s first attempt to find a spokesman in the United States failed.

Fletcher ‘discovered’ super-mastication while on business in Chicago in June 1898. Killing time by lingering over a hotel meal, he found that eating very slowly left him satisfied on less. Six months later, he had shed 50 lb and felt rejuvenated. It nevertheless proved impossible to persuade others that the achievement was medically or socially significant. During this period, Fletcher was engaged in promoting ‘social quarantine’, a movement which aimed to nurture the natural goodness of children and to prevent them being led into immoral ways of living. Towards the end of 1898, Fletcher published his first book on super-mastication, What Sense? or, Economic Nutrition, and began to advocate chewing as part of this programme of social reform.²⁰ During a lecture tour in November, he tried, without success, to explain the connection between chewing and child welfare to doctors in Burlington, Vermont. The next month, he approached W. O. Atwater, chief nutrition investigator for the US Department of Agriculture, who was based at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. Atwater had worked on dietary studies at Hull House, one of Chicago’s famous settlement houses, the staff of which was backing social quarantine.²¹ In 1895, Atwater had confirmed the nutritional standards set by Emil Voit, the German physiologist. Fletcher tried to persuade Atwater that he and Voit had grossly over-estimated the calories necessary for subsistence, but Atwater would have none of it. Rebuffed by both medical authority and bemused colleagues in the reform movement, Fletcher left the United States and in 1900 took up residence in Venice.

In Venice, Fletcher immediately found his megaphone – his future son-in-law, Ernest Van Someren, an English physician earning his living as a hotel doctor. During the autumn and winter of 1900–1, Van Someren tested Fletcher’s theories on himself, and on Fletcher, Dr Pietro Leonardi (Professor of Physiological Chemistry at the University of Pavia) and members of the Venetian nobility. Crediting chewing with easing his own diabetic symptoms, Van Someren presented his findings at the annual meeting of the British Medical Association in July 1901. He fully endorsed Fletcher’s claims and even described in suitably scientific language the ‘secondary reflex of deglutition’ that had been suppressed by non-use – the food filter.²² At the invitation of Sir Michael Foster, the outgoing president of the International Congress of Physiology, Van Someren read his paper again at that society’s annual meeting in Turin in September. Delegates from sixteen countries were present. In just three months, Fletcherism had gone from obscurity to consideration by leading physiologists. The most critical comment recorded in the discussion period was that more exact experiments by others might cast doubt on Van Someren’s conclusions.²³ Fou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction: Nutrition in Britain: Science, Scientists and Politics in the Twentieth Century
• 1. Fletcherism: The Chew-Chew Fad of the Edwardian Era
• 2. The Foundation and Early Years of the Dunn Nutritional Laboratory
• 3. Nutrition Science and the Food and Pharmaceutical Industries in Inter-War Britain
• 4. King’s College of Household and Social Science and the Origins of Dietetics Education
• 5. Relief and Research: The Nutrition Work of the National Birthday Trust Fund, 1935–9
• 6. The Popularisation of Milk as a Beverage During the 1930s
• 7. Nutrition Science and the two World Wars
• 8. Agreement and Disagreement in the Making of World of Plenty
• 9. Government Policy on School Meals and Welfare Foods, 1939–70
• 10. Does Early Nutrition Affect Later Health? Views from the 1930s and 1980s
• 11. Going Public: Food Campaigns during the 1980s and Early 1990s
• Index