How I Forgot to Chew (And Why My Father Ensured I Did)

Editor’s note: What does it mean to eat like you’re running out of time? Why does anyone do that? Don’t we know better?

It’s this thing—“knowing”—which through the lens of science is about finding just the right fact somewhere and then doing it. Which frames “knowing” as the problem. But that’s not how life works. As Tanmoy Goswami reveals in this gorgeously moving personal essay, our relationship with food isn’t about willpower or knowledge—it’s about fear, love, and the stories our bodies remember. And why changing how we eat means confronting how we’ve learned to live.

I have admired Tanmoy’s writing for so long, and am so glad that he chose to write for us. He is a lived experience expert and the creator of Sanity, a solo-run, independent, reader-funded mental health storytelling platform with subscribers in over 50 countries. You can connect with him here and here.

PS: Here is a short feedback form to help us understand how we’re doing. Would you please share your thoughts? Link here. For more, you’ve got my email.

— Samarth Bansal (samarth@thewholetruthfoods.com)

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My wife would have cheered for Horace Fletcher. My father would have called him names.

Fletcher, a millionaire health reformer in the US in the early-1900s, had a singular mission: teaching Americans how to chew well. Through his own struggles with obesity, he had come to suspect that swallowing food too quickly was to blame for all manner of illnesses. He believed that digestion happened in the mouth, not in the stomach. Ergo: If you didn’t chew your food thoroughly, it would pile up in your intestines and block you up.

He also claimed that citizens extracting the maximum energy out of every morsel by chewing it to a mush — he once chewed a green onion 722 times over a full 12 minutes — would fuel a prosperous economy. Among Fletcher’s fans were Arthur Conan Doyle and US President Herbert Hoover. The novelist Upton Sinclair even coined a nifty slogan for Fletcherism: “Nature will castigate those who don’t masticate.”

Odds are, you too grew up with a dietary rule apocryphally credited to Fletcher: You must chew every bite 32 times (once for each tooth).

My wife, born to a vegetarian Kannadiga family based in Delhi, inherited this rule from her strict maternal grandfather. She swears that slowly is the only human-like way to eat and is constantly dismayed that I, a carnivorous Bengali from the small steel town of Durgapur, have no regard or talent for this life skill. She likes savouring her food. I want to get it out of the way.

Once at a fish market in Sweden, I swallowed a smelly jar of herring without stopping for air and nearly choked. At a small fish-and-chips joint in England, I ate a giant beer-battered haddock and half a kilo of vinegar fries so fast that I felt like fainting. Just last week at an Andhra restaurant in Mysuru, I put away four refills of rice and rasam before my brain could register that my belly was painfully distended. My wife had no idea that I had to crawl to the loo and vomit so I could breathe again.

Don’t get me wrong: I do understand the value of a good chew. I have lived my entire life with serious mental health conditions, accompanied by assorted bowel and weight issues. I am aware that people with healthy weight tend to be more efficient chewers. I also know that eating slowly could help me control my portions by stimulating the production of “fullness hormones”, make me feel more in control, and curb my perennially high stress levels.

I have another strong motivation to slow down: I want to model healthy mastication before our 7-year-old.

I just don’t know how to.

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“You’ll always come last”

As a child, I was a meticulous chewer. I’d start eating an hour before everyone else and finish an hour after. Books were responsible for my sloth. I wouldn’t eat without a Tintin or Feluda open in front of me. My mother had to wait inordinately for me to finish my cycle of chewing every bite cow-like – licking my fingers – sipping water – flipping the page – repeat, so she could clean up the mess of fossilised drumsticks and crusty gravy I left in a circle around my plate on the floor.

Maa, a nurse, indulged my inefficiency. But my father, a worker in the local steel plant, had no patience for it.

“How can anyone eat so slowly?” he’d bellow every mealtime. “You will never be able to catch a bus or train. All your friends will move on without you. You will always come last at everything. HAATH CHAALA. Move your hand. TARATARI KHAA. Eat faster.”

Eating with Baba is a dizzying experience. He is loud. And relentless. He slurps great quantities of bhaat and aaloo poshto and maacher shorshe while simultaneously commenting on the lack of salt in this and the excessive turmeric in that, noisily licking his fingers and burping mid-meal, ladling a heap of leftover pumpkin meant for the dogs and reprimanding us for wasting food while complaining that he has overeaten, and before you know it he is already gargling with great torrents of water and spitting out every grain of food from his oral cavity with such force that you’d think he was going to burst a vein. His eating isn’t pretty. But he eats with all his being.

When I was a child, his being was also frequently possessed with violent rage. Failing to follow his orders had terrifying consequences. His sudden explosions over seemingly trivial matters used to confuse me, but I learned early that safety lay in unquestioning obedience.

So I began to truncate my luxuriant meals. I figured out that delivering every mouthful straight from my fingers to my oesophagus, bypassing my teeth altogether, was a great hack to eat at 2x speed.

I found help in my lifelong aphthous ulcers. Every couple of weeks, my mouth erupts in fiery red boils that make chewing impossible. When I was small, a dentist had pronounced: “This boy seems stressed.”

Of course, “stress” was an absurd diagnosis for a kid in the small-town India of the 80s. But happily, the ulcers gave me further practice of eating without chewing.

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When speed is not a choice