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By Root 1232 0

having ended up constipated. This was also the presenting complaint of many of his fletcherizing spa guests. Fletcher recommended a diet of potatoes, cornbread, and beans, and an occasional egg. As important as the food choices, he taught, was that we think happy thoughts while we eat. This could not further narrow dinner conversation by much, since the chewing silenced everyone almost completely. One writer of the time commented that at dining parties “[These] strange creatures seldom repay attention. The best that can be expected from them is the tense and awful silence that always accompanies their excruciating tortures of mastication.”6 The “fletcherites” were a new “horror to dining out.” Part of the point of fletcherizing was to fool yourself into eating much less than Americans were used to. Fletcher was a man of surprising physical strength and bright optimism, and he used demonstrations of his strength and personal magnetism to sell the chewing cure.

Fletcher promised that the chewing would calm you down and make you happy. He himself reported that before he discovered chewing he was in a malaise, having lost interest in “life and in [his] work.”7 The novelist Henry James attested that fletcherizing had caused his “serenity” to return, chatting with his friend Edith Wharton about “the divine Fletcher,” and referring to himself as a fanatic. Henry’s brother William, the Harvard philosopher, wrote in the Harvard Crimson that Fletcher’s techniques worked wonders for the health and happiness for those who had tried it, and if they turned out to work for everyone, “it is impossible to overestimate their revolutionary import.”8 Such journals as Scientific American (as prestigious then as it is now) enthusiastically supported Fletcher’s claims. Indeed, the magazine’s articles on various health subjects took Fletcher’s chewing instructions as a basic assumption.9 Can you imagine how it would be if, on top of everything else there is to worry about, you also felt guilty about how many chews you managed per bite? It sounds awful.

Yet so many people were avid fans, reporting that since they began the extreme chewing, they felt much better. Many of us go in and out of phases of controlling our diet in one way or another. Think about what we mean when we are in such a phase and tell other people about it, with the capper that we “feel much better.” What is it that feels better? Does it seem the same as what a fletcherizer felt? Our weight-reduction diets and their chewing both have an accompanying physical strain, in the belly and in the jaw, respectively, to remind you of them all day: both leave you feeling hungry, alive to your desires; both make you feel proud of your willpower; and both apparently give you the sense that you are getting happier. Whether they also create a noticeable biological “high” for a given practitioner is a matter that may be decided by judgment or trial. Try fads for happiness, but try them like a scientist. Pay attention.

Upton Sinclair was a “chewer,” writing that his introduction to mastication was “one of the great discoveries of my life.” Throughout his life, Sinclair wrote about poverty and hunger, and I do not think these things are unconnected. Sinclair’s The Jungle was, to his mind, an incendiary book about American poverty. No one would publish it at first because it seemed too angry: Macmillan refused it because “[o]ne feels that what is at the bottom of his fierceness is not nearly so much desire to help the poor as hatred of the rich.” This, by contrast, is how Sinclair saw it: “I wrote with tears and anguish, pouring into the pages all that pain which life had meant to me. Externally the story had to do with a family of stockyard workers, but internally it was the story of my own family.”10 A socialist journal helped get the book published. Then a funny thing happened. The public “missed” the poverty message and paid attention only to the disgusting way that the stockyard workers were told to adulterate sausage. For Sinclair, this was an evil of capitalism, and for emotional effect,