With regard to the statement that "whatever has no taste is not
nutritious," copied from a high educational authority, correction
certainly must be made. Pure proteid has no perceptible taste as
measured by taste-bud appreciation, any more than pure water has
specific taste, and yet who may not say that "water tastes good" when
one is really thirsty. Taste is a very subtle sense and is closely
allied to feeling. Things are often said to taste good because they
feel good in the mouth or to the throat as they descend to the stomach.
Regarding also the advice to remove from the mouth refractory substance
that the teeth and saliva cannot reduce to a condition to excite the
Swallowing Impulse. There is theoretical and actual nutriment in the
cottony fibre of tough lobster, or poor fish, or lean pork, and there
is good reason to believe that a strong digestive apparatus _can_ take
care of such tough substance _after a fashion_ and get nutriment out of
it. In the same way the hard, woody fibre of old nuts is the identical
material that was rich in juicy oils and proteid when the nuts were
fresh, but if swallowed in the toughened condition that age brings to
nuts, it is but slowly reduced in the stomach and intestines and only
at enormous expense. If putrifactive bacterial decomposition has to be
resorted to to get rid of the stuff the process is then poisonous as
well as difficult.
According to physiological authority which we must, for the moment,
accept, proteid is a vitally-necessary material and we cannot afford
to waste it. Our life depends upon proteid to replace the waste of
muscular tissue which occurs with every movement, but when even
good proteid is found by the mouth to be in a form that is too
refractory for the teeth to handle, it is poor policy to send it on
to the toothless stomach and intestines for the accomplishment of the
reduction. If the mouth cannot handle what its guardian senses don't
like, it can spit it out and get rid of it immediately; but if the
stomach or intestines are afflicted with something that is harder than
they can easily take care of, they have to call in the assistance of
bacterial scavengers whose method is poisonous decomposition, and whose
fee is putridity of odour penetrating the whole system and issuing at
every pore, making Cologne water a large commodity even in so-called
Polite Society.
There are discernible in the mouth distinct senses of discrimination
against substance that is undesirable for the system. If the mouth
senses are permitted to express an opinion, their antipathy is easily
read. It is far safer to spit out what the natural impulse of
swallowing hesitates at, or fails to suck up with avidity, than it is
to force a swallowing to get rid of it simply to satisfy a prudish
"table manner" objection. To avoid "impolite" condemnation we really
make "hogs of ourselves" "on the sly," and vulgar slang alone is
appropriate to express the shameful confession.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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