Food follies

Dr. Melik: For breakfast, he requested something called wheat germ, organic honey, and tiger's milk.

Doctor: Oh yes. Those are the charmed substances that some years ago were thought to contain life preserving properties.

Dr. Melik: You mean there was no deep fat? No steak, or cream pies, or hot fudge?

Doctor: Those were thought to be unhealthy. Precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true.

--Sleeper.

AJ Loftin reviews Terrors of the Table, a book by Walter Gratzer that looks at the history of food quackery from the 18th Century to the present.

Gratzer is justifiably fascinated by the cranks and crackpots who profited wildly from poisonous or useless elixirs, and by the earnest scientists who sacrificed their health and sanity—and the health and sanity of others—to better understand our nutritional needs. Take the 18th-century Italian abbot Lazzaro Spallanzani, who, for three days at a stretch, would hold tubes of minced meat and animals’ gastric juices under his armpits, to simulate digestion.

My favorite crackpot—American, naturally—was Horace Fletcher, the Great Masticator, who launched a fad that swept the United States and Europe at the turn of the 20th century: Chew each bite 32 times, he proclaimed, and you will enjoy perfect health. “Chewing parties became popular in fashionable circles,” writes Gratzer. “These ‘muncheons,’ in which the participants were enjoined to chew with their heads low over the plate so that the tongue could hang down, were often coordinated by a conductor, who timed the mastication of each mouthful and rang a bell or struck a gong when the moment came to swallow.” Among Fletcher’s followers was Henry James—no wonder he chewed over everything so endlessly in his prose.