Horace Fletcher, the Great Masticator

Horace Fletcher is best known for starting a food fad in that came to be known as Fletcherism. This early 20th century fad involved, in part, chewing your food A LOT.

Research:

• Bauerlein, Mark. "The Correspondence of William James. Vol. 3: William and Henry. 1897-1910." The Henry James Review, vol. 16 no. 1, 1995, p. 115-117. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/hjr.1995.0002.
• Crowninshield, Francis W. “Manners for the Metropolis: An Entrance Key to the Fantastic Life of the 400.” New York. D. Appleton and Company. 1909. Via Babel Trust. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.31175009622302
• Feltman, Rachel. “Fact: Horace Fletcher became a millionaire lifestyle influencer by telling people to chew as much as possible.” Popular Science. 4/26/2021. https://www.popsci.com/story/science/weirdest-thing-fletcherism-wawa-genetic-testing/
• Fleissner, Jennifer L. "Henry James's Art of Eating." ELH, vol. 75 no. 1, 2008, p. 27-62. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/elh.2008.0001.
• Franklin, Deborah. “Chew, Chew, Chew!” NPR. 7/13/2009. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2009/07/chew_chew_chew.html/
• Kean, Sam. “Disappearing spoon: Chewing it Over—and Over and Over and Over.” Distillations. Podcast. 5/4/2021. https://www.sciencehistory.org/distillations/podcast/chewing-it-over-and-over-and-over-and-over
• "Horace Fletcher." Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1936. Gale In Context: U.S. History, link.gale.com/apps/doc/BT2310013484/GPS?u=mlin_n_melpub&sid=bookmark-GPS&xid=e3d11c0e. Accessed 13 Dec. 2022.
• Levenstein, Harvey A. “Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet.” Berkeley : University of California Press. 2003.
• New York Times. “HORACE FLETCHER DIES IN COPENHAGEN; Dietetics Expert Was Originator of a System for Proper Mastication of Food. HIS EXPERIMENTS AT YALE Official Food Economist Taught ‘Fletcherism’ to 8,000,000 Starving Belgians During the War.” 1/14/1919. https://www.nytimes.com/1919/01/14/archives/horace-fletcher-dies-in-copenhagen-dietetics-expert-was-originator.html
• Temple, Holly Eliza. “Repast: Horace Fletcher, the Original Food Faddist.” This Is Mold. 5/21/2021. https://thisismold.com/profile/repast/repast-horace-fletcher-the-original-food-faddist
• Walthausen, Abby. “Fletcherizing Was the Juicing of the 1890s.” MyRecipes. 2/13/2018. https://www.myrecipes.com/extracrispy/fletcherizing-was-the-juicing-of-the-1890s
• Roach, Mary. “How Many Times Should You Chew Your Food?” Adapted from Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal. Slate. 4/10/2013. http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_examiner/2013/04/excerpt_of_mary_roach_s_gulp_how_many_times_should_you_chew_a_bite_of_food.html
• Fletcher, Horace. “Menticulture; or, the A-B-C of True Living.” Chicago. A.C. Mcclurg & Company. 1895.
• Fletcher, Horace. “Happiness as Found in Forethought Minus Fearthought.” New York. Frederick A. Stokes Company. 1898.
• Fletcher, Horace. “That Last Waif, Or, Social Quarantine: A Brief.” New York. Frederick A Stokes Company. 1898, 1909.
• Fletcher, Horace. “The New Glutton, Or, Epicure.” New York. Frederick A Stokes Company. 1899, 1903.
• Fletcher, Horace. “A.B.C. of Snap Shooting.” San Francisco. Published by the Author. 1880.
• Fletcher, Horace. “The A.B.-Z. of Our Own Nutrition.” New York. Frederick A Stokes Company. 1903.
• Fletcher, Horace. “Fletcherism: What It Is, Or, How I Became Young At Sixty.” Frederick A. Stokes Company. 1913.
• Chittenden, Russell H. “Physiological Economy in Nutrition.” Popular Science Monthly Volume 63 June 1903. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Popular_Science_Monthly/Volume_63/June_1903/Physiological_Economy_in_Nutrition
• Chittenden, Russell H. “Physiological Economy in Nutrition.” Popular Science Monthly Volume 63 June 1903. “The Influence of Diet on Endur

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. I have
had Horace Fletcher on my to do list for a
podcast for forever. He is best known for starting a

(00:24):
food fad that came to be known as Fletcherism, and
this involved, uh largely, chewing your food a lot. There
were some other aspects to but chewing a lot, a lot,
a lot. There were a ton of food fattists in
the early twentieth century, and Fletcher was really one of
the most famous. He probably if you were ranking them,

(00:47):
he would come in second to John Harvey Kellogg, who
we've talked about on the show before. Kellogg called Horace
Fletcher the quote founder of a new and wonderful movement.
And if you've seen the movie The Road to Wellville
and you remember the scene where they sing a song
about chewing, there really was such a song. The song

(01:08):
in the movie not the real song. There doesn't seem
to be like a surviving copy of the actual song,
but there there was a song that they sang in
the dining room about chewing. Uh. So heads up. Uh,
this episode is about a food fad, so we're going
to be talking a lot about food and eating and

(01:29):
restrictive diets and weight loss and all that kind of stuff.
And then also when I described what Fletcherizing involved to
my spouse, he found it incredibly gross and insisted that
I needed to warn people about that too. Um. And
just to be incredibly clear, we are not advocating any

(01:49):
of these methods. In fact, we are not making any
dietary recommendations whatsoever in this episode. We are just talking
about them. Horace Page Fletcher was born August tenth, eighteen
forty nine, in Lawrence, Massachusetts. That's on the Merrimack River,
about thirty miles north of Boston. His parents were Isaac
and Mary Blake Fletcher, and he was the youngest of

(02:12):
their four children. A lot of his life sounds like
it must have been both fascinating and exciting, but most
sources repeat the same few points without a lot of
concrete detail. Like a very brief obituary of Horace's father, Isaac,
describes him as a stone contractor, a deacon at First
Baptist Church of Lawrence, and one of Lawrence's oldest citizens.

(02:34):
When he died in eighteen eighty five at the age
of seventy six. Other than that, we don't really know
much about the family or what their life was like. Yeah,
according to one person who wrote an obituary, he had
been working on an autobiography, and this obituary writer was like,
I sure hope that wasn't lost, But as far as
I know it was lost, that does still exist somewhere.

(02:57):
I wasn't able to find reference to it. We have
a pretty good sense though, that Horace always loved adventure,
and when he was nine years old he tried to
run away so he could go to See. He did
not go to see. Somebody caught him and brought him
back home, and then after that point he was sent
to school in New London, New Hampshire. Once he finished school,

(03:20):
he once again tried to go to See, this time successfully.
He found a position on a whaler that was bound
for Japan, and after this trip he had just a
lifelong fascination with Japan and more specifically with Buddhism. After
returning to the US, Fletcher enrolled in Dartmouth College, but
he only stayed there for a year before setting off

(03:41):
for more travels. He later described his life this way.
Quote four complete trips around the world, two of them
before the time of ocean steamship lines and continental railroads,
thirty six trips across the American continent by various rail,
water and stage routes. Six teen voyages across the Pacific Ocean,

(04:02):
and many across the Atlantic. Intermittent periods of residents in
many different countries of Europe, in China, in India, in Japan,
and in different localities in the Americas, as well as
visits to parts remote from the lines of travel, such
as South Africa, Yucatan, and the mountain regions of Mexico
and Central America. That are the types of all the

(04:24):
South American countries, and all of which residences and visits
have been chosen at times of greatest interest in each
locality in response to the invitation of the spirit of
adventure by which I have been led. These, together with
no less than thirty eight distinct occupations, embraced the sum
of my opportunities. So yeah, that reference to occupations. He

(04:48):
was not always just traveling for its own sake, Although
I'm sure some of those trips were mostly about pleasure.
He was also making money doing things like working aboard
ships and importing and exporting US goods. He also developed
a reputation as an athlete and a marksman. In eighteen
eighty he wrote a pamphlet called ABC of Snap Shooting, Sporting,

(05:10):
Exhibition and Military so along with describing how to raise,
point and fire a weapon all in one fast and
efficient and accurate movement, this pamphlet also described a Fletcher
ball bell that you could use as a throne target.
This was made from two metal hemispheres joined by a post,

(05:31):
which would make a very distinctive ringing sound if the
shooter hit it. He described at length why the Fletcher
bell ball was superior to other types of throne targets.
The back of this pamphlet also contained an advertisement for
a rowing machine patent applied for that Fletcher had designed,

(05:51):
which came in different configurations, including one's meant to be
used by rowing clubs. In eighteen eighty, so the same
year that he published that pamphlet, the thirty one year
old Fletcher was settled enough in San Francisco, California that
he actually registered to vote there, so presumably planning to
stay at least for a little while, and a year

(06:13):
later he married Grace Adelaide Marsh, who was twenty four.
Grace had a four year old daughter named Ivy, also
a one. Fletcher applied for another patents along with William
Rose Finch. This one was for improvements in breach loading firearms.
While living in San Francisco, Fletcher seems to have kept

(06:35):
up his habit of pursuing various interests. In addition to
the shooting manual in the rowing machine and those firearm improvements,
he made a printer's ink, and he established an import
business to bring in goods from Asia. He liked to paint,
and he exhibited his own work. He also was an
avid reader and autodidact. According to some accounts, he helped

(06:57):
establish the Bohemian Club that's an elite, invitation only men's
social club. But the Bohemian Club was established in eighteen
seventy two, when Fletcher was only twenty three, does not
seem to have been the time when he was living
in San Francisco. Yet eventually the Fletchers moved to New Orleans.
Later on, Horace was described as quote one of the

(07:18):
social and literary lights of New Orleans. This writer also
described him as a ripe scholar a charming gentleman and
a successful businessman. By eight nine two, he was managing
the New Orleans Opera House, although this seems to have
led to some financial trouble. Operas are expensive, and in

(07:39):
eighteen ninety four the Opera Guarantee Association filed suit against
him over ten thousand dollars an opera company debt. This
is debt that Fletcher was contractually obligated to pay off.
Other than that lawsuit, it really seems like Fletcher was
living a pretty good life, one in which he was
well liked and well respect and wherever he went, and

(08:01):
which was also full of travel and adventure and things
that he enjoyed. He had made a lot of money
and then used it to fund things like opera and
theater and art. But as he got into his mid forties,
he was also experiencing what we think a lot of
us do in our mid forties. He was feeling kind
of run down. He had persistent indigestion, and he also

(08:22):
came down with what he described as a case of
influenza about every six months around He applied for a
life insurance policy and he was turned down as an
unacceptable health risk. This was a wake up call. Fletcher
later described this experience this way quote. About ten years ago,

(08:42):
at the critical age of forty four, the author was
fast becoming a physical wreck in the midst of a
business club and social tempest. Although he was trained as
an athlete in his youth and had lived an active
and most agreeable life, he had contracted a degree of
physical disorder that made him ineligible as an insurance risk.

(09:04):
This unexpected disability, with such unmistakable warning, was so much
a shock to his hopes of a long life that
it led to his making a strong personal effort to
save himself. So he decided to stop what he was doing,
figure out what was causing all of these changes to
his body and health, and then fix it quote. The

(09:27):
study was taken up in a systematic manner, account of
which is too long to relate here. But the eager
auto reformer soon learned that his troubles came from too
much of many things, among them too much food and
too much needless worry. And realizing the danger ahead, he
sought a way to cure himself of his disabilities by

(09:48):
the help of an economic food supply, as did Luigi Cornaro.
But what is even more important. He found a way
to enjoy the smaller quantity of food much more than
any plethora luxury can give, and arrived at the method
by a route that showed a means of conserving a
healthy economy and an increased pleasure of eating at the

(10:09):
same time, in quite a simple and scientific manner that
anyone may learn and practice without any ascetic deprivation whatever.
So side note. Luigi Cornaro was a Venetian nobleman who
lived in the sixteenth century and credit a severe calorie
restriction with restoring him to physical health, and Fletcher brought

(10:31):
him up a lot in his writing. Fletcher later described
this as a five month process in which he assessed
how he was thinking, eating and just living and made changes.
And in his mind those changes were so successful and
so transformative that he needed to share them with others.
So soon he was writing books on the subject. And

(10:51):
we're going to get into all of that after we
pause for a sponsor break. Although Horace Fletcher's most famous
health advice was about chewing food, his first books didn't
really focus on that at all. His first two books

(11:14):
were Mental Culture or The Abc of True Living, published
in and Happiness as Found in Forethought Minus Fear Thought,
which came out two years later. I feel like that
could be published today and people would lap it up
with a spoon, for sure. A lot of the things

(11:34):
that he talks about in these books are very um
in line with things that you might read in various
self help or maybe kind of new a G books today.
So Mental Culture was expanded from a talk that Fletcher
gave a New Orleans to a group of what we're
called mental scientists that would have included psychologists, moral philosophers, behaviorists,

(11:59):
basedly anyone whose work was connected to the mind and
mental health at this relatively early point in the history
of psychology as a field. He mentioned humanity struggled to
treat disease until the development of germ theory, and in
Fletcher's view, mental illnesses had germs of their own, and
there were ways to get rid of those germs. Rs.

(12:21):
Fletcher stressed that this was not his own new discovery.
Quote Christ, Buddha, Aristotle, Omar Khyam, and many others have
all suggested that the elimination of the evil passions is
entirely possible. But my special analysis of them and the
easy method of defeat that I have found possible to

(12:42):
myself have excited such interests that I have been induced
to publish them without attempting to follow the subject beyond
the elementary stage. Long story short, all of those evil
passions were rooted in anger or worry, and if you
got rid of anger and worry, you could get rid
of all of their associated ills. That sounds great. Yeah,

(13:06):
he doesn't ever seem to engage with the idea that,
like a person could have a mental illness, that that
makes getting rid of worry and anger kind of outside
of their control in a lot of ways. Right, there's
a presumption of like a level playing field of everyone's
mental health. Yes, yeah, but you know, I have for

(13:29):
sure been in places or times in my life when
I was making a lot of my own misery by
my own uh like thought patterns, and you know, getting
out of those thought patterns changed things. So I mean,
that's that part of it is both appealing and problematic.

(13:49):
So anyway, he offered a prescription for how to do
this quote one grain of the assurance of Christ that
man is made in the image of God, one grain
of risk begged for the responsibility of the care and
culture of the divine essence with which we have been entrusted.
One grain of the command of Christ implying a possibility

(14:11):
be perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfect. One
grain of the example of Buddha that a man can
grow to perfection through the elimination of anger and worry
and their brood of dependent passions. One grain of the
wisdom of Aristotle, which declared that the passions are habits
of the mind and can be gotten rid of as

(14:32):
physical habits are gotten rid of. One grain of the
assurance of Omar Khayam that Heaven and Hell are within ourselves.
One grain of the assurance of Christ that the Kingdom
of Heaven is at hand. One grain of common sense
applied to an analysis of mental handicaps and the discovery
of their limitations. One grain of the today experience of

(14:55):
the author that anger and worry are the roots of
all the passion which depress and can be eliminated. Sounds
great uh Fletcher's next book, Happiness as Found in Forethought
Minus Fear Thought, was quote written in answer to many
questions elicited by the publication of mental culture. He offered

(15:19):
further thoughts on anger and fear in getting rid of them,
and outlined various definitions of concepts like altruism and envy.
As an example, here is his definition of optimism quote
optimism is forethought. Christianity, pure and undefiled is perfect optimism.
Christ is the perfect optimist. And for pessimism, pessimism is

(15:42):
fear thought. Pessimism is the devil. He stressed the need
to stay focused on the present with such gems as
let us work together for a season in the now field,
which is one of the best sentences I have ever read.
We're just gonna work in the now field. He also

(16:03):
offered some aphorisms and rules for living, including don't be
a sewer, which I think that's some good advice. Do
not be a sewer. I used to have a dance
teacher that would say that all the time, and I
wonder if she knew this is where it came from,
don't be a sewer. In Fletcher published That Last Waif
or a Social Quarantine a brief. This was a call

(16:27):
for better treatment of children, especially orphaned and abandoned children,
and he donated the book's proceeds to that cause. He
gave in it an anecdote of seeing a child about
four years old living in poverty in New Orleans during
the Spanish American War and feeling moved to see such
children better cared for. This wasn't a purely altruistic impulse.

(16:49):
The hope was that this would protect these children from
bad influences and allow them to grow up into productive,
upstanding members of society. Fletcher proposed to do this by
establishing kindergartens that would act as a social quarantine, which,
in his words, meant quote, throwing a perfect cordon of

(17:09):
care around tender souls coming into a nation or community,
so that none shall escape contact with the wholesome suggestions
and adequate nourishment that are essential to growth and habit
forming according to the best intelligence of the science of
child life. In this publication, he included a long list

(17:30):
of recommended organizations that he thought should participate in this
kindergarten project, as well as committees that needed to be
established to carry it out. This work included a lot
of references to educator Sarah Brown Ingersoll Cooper, who had
been a prominent voice in the kindergarten movement until her
tragic death just a couple of years before this. If

(17:51):
you go looking for information about her, this death involved
a suicide, So be Aware um It reprinted some of
her work as part of the book. Shortly before publishing
The Last Wave, Fletcher also put out a pair of
pamphlets on eating and nutrition, What Sense or Economic Nutrition
and Nature's Food Filter or What and When to Swallow.

(18:15):
He combined and expanded on them in eight nine, and
the result was The New Glutton or Epicure, which he
revised again and republished in nineteen o three. So Mental
Culture and Happiness had detailed how he had improved his
mental health by getting rid of anger and worry, and
according to these works on food and nutrition, he had

(18:37):
improved his physical health by changing how he ate, primarily
by chewing a lot more. This was in the middle
of a ton of food fads that developed in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There was a big
cultural focus on what to eat and how much to eat,
and how that could affect a person's health. We talked

(18:58):
about James Salzburg and his meat based diet not long
ago on the show, and he started his research into
that in the eighteen fifties and sixties. Other people writing
around the same time took the opposite view that people
ate too much meat, and that a vegetarian diet was
really the way to go. Of course, there have been
vegetarians and people who primarily ate meat forever, but this

(19:23):
went a little further, with a lot of focus on
the supposed curative benefits of these kinds of food choices.
Raw foodists, fruititarians, and others took similar tax, arguing that
their specific diet was the key to perfect health. This
is a pattern we still see today, with various fad
diets promising to like cure everything. That time, so within

(19:50):
the scientific and medical communities there was also a lot
of discussion about how much people should eat, including how
much of which nutrients. The term vitamin hadn't been coined yet,
but various researchers were looking at things like sugar and
protein how much a person's body really needed to function.

(20:11):
In the second half of the nineteenth century, various researchers
started quantifying the energy in food as calories and developing
instruments to measure calorie content. So, while Fletcher's work was
based on pretty much his own experience and his own reading,
he was writing about it at a time when a

(20:32):
lot of different people were suggesting that different foods or
combinations of foods or nutrients or whatever could effectively act
as cure alls, and also studying the nutrients in food
more methodically and how they affected the body like in
a more scientific systemic way. During his months of examining

(20:54):
his own life and habits, Fletcher had decided that he
was eating too much and eating too fast, and that
this was true of most other people as well. But
he also came to some very erroneous conclusions about human
anatomy and physiology. He thought that most digestion happened in
the mouth, that the anatomy of the mouth, including anatomical

(21:15):
structures in the palate and throat, acted as a nutrient gait,
that indigestible foods became digestible only after being chewed thoroughly
and being mixed with saliva, And very importantly, that chewing
food sufficiently required you to keep chewing until the food
had lost all its flavor and had been rendered into
a nutrient liquid that would slide past that gate and

(21:38):
down the throat involuntarily. It would, in his words, swallow itself.
It makes me so sad. Yes, the food's taste offered
a clue to how long that chewing needed to go
on as long as there was a flavor present, there

(21:59):
were nutrient still needed to be extracted. In some of
his writing he kind of personifies this in the form
of doctor Taste, who tells you if you're ready to
swallow your food or not indigestible sediments meaning anything that
was not liquefied and remained in the mouth during that
involuntary swallow that was unnecessary, you could spit it out.

(22:23):
And if you were really chewing your food that thoroughly
and according to him, absorbing all the nutrients and spitting
out all the waste, then you would of course see
a big difference on the other end of the digestive
tract as well. He called feces digestion ash both because
of what he said it resembled when eating this way
and because he thought that the body had burned away

(22:45):
all of the nutritious substance as fuel and left only
ash behind. Some key misunderstandings about the whole thing. Yeah,
so this chewing process went way, way, way beyond the
idea of chewing each bite thirty two times, which I
think most of us have probably heard somebody say that before.

(23:06):
It's often attributed to British Prime Minister William Gladstone, I'm
not actually sure whether he really said that. Uh. Most
of the time when I tried to track it down,
stuff circled back to Horace Letcher. So I don't really
know how many times a person needed to chew a
bite of food. According to Fletcher, depended on the food.

(23:29):
He wrote, quote, some morsels of food will not resist
thirty two mastications, while others will defy seven hundred. The
author has found that one fifth of an ounce of
the midway section of the garden young onion, sometimes called
the chalet, has required seven hundred and twenty two mastications

(23:51):
before disappearing through involuntary swallowing. After the tussle. However, the
young onion left no odor upon the breath and joy
to the happy family in the stomach, as if it
had been of corn starch, softness and consistency. Fletcher also
applied his ideas to liquids. Quote, don't drink soup, don't

(24:13):
drink milk, don't drink beer, don't drink wine, don't drink
syrup sodas for the taste of the syrups. Sip everything
that has tastes, so that taste, can inspect it and
get the good out of it for you. Now you're
supposed to hold it in your mouth, and so you
didn't taste it anymore. Horace Fletcher claimed the eating and

(24:34):
drinking in this way allowed him to consume a whole
lot less without feeling deprived in any way. Quote the
author ate just what his appetite called for, as nearly
as circumstances of supply permitted. He ate all that his
appetite would allow, enjoyed a gustatory pleasure that had never
been equalled under old habits of taking food, and was

(24:57):
a distinct epicurean gainer by the economy learned and practiced.
He described himself as five ft seven inches tall and
two hundred five pounds when he started eating this way,
and said that about four months later he weighed a
hundred and sixty three pounds, and that his energy had returned,
along with his desire to do physical activity as he

(25:18):
had in his younger years. In some circles, all of
this really got on, and Fletcher wound up with some
very famous devotees. We'll get into that after a sponsor break.

(25:39):
Horace Fletchers, the new Glutton, or epicure included some of
the correspondents that he had had with other high profile
people in the world of food and health fads. One
was Edward H. Dewey, who was a proponent of fasting
and the author of a work called The No Breakfast
Plan and the Pasting Cure. Another was John Harvey Kellogg,

(26:03):
who we've talked about before, whose Battle Creek Sanitarium, nicknamed
the Sand, was renowned as a center for health and wellness.
Among other things, Kellogg advocated a bland vegetarian diet, and
for a time he also advocated Fletcherism at the Sand.
He was also a proponent of eugenics and one of

(26:24):
several people to introduce Fletcher's ideas into the eugenics movement.
In nineteen hundred, Fletcher and his family were staying at
a hotel in Venice, and Fletcher became friends with the
hotel physician Ernest van Somren. Van Somren became interested in
Fletcher's ideas, and in nineteen o one he read a
paper to the British Medical Association in which he summarized them.

(26:47):
He said that he had improved his own health by
chewing his food thoroughly and reducing his protein intake. Van
Summern said Fletcherism had allowed him to cure himself of gout, headaches,
frequent colds, exima, and other maladies, while also improving his
mental health and his outlook on life. Ernest van Summerin
also married Fletcher's stepdaughter, Ivy. That happened in nineteen o two.

(27:11):
Beyond Fletcher's published work and lectures on food and nutrition,
he also had money, and during these same years he
started trying to establish and fund a nutrition research institute.
This may have led some nutritionists to give him more
attention than they might have otherwise, since newly developed instruments

(27:32):
like respiration calorimeters were expensive. Sir Michael Foster of Cambridge
University heard about Fletcher's plans and invited him to come
for a visit. Although it seems like Fletcher's ideas did
get some support at Cambridge, the university eventually turned its
attention to funding from the Carnegie Institution was also providing

(27:52):
money for this kind of research and not advocating that
people choose their food until it was a tasteless pulp.
Fletcher visited the same in two and that same year
he carried out a publicity stunt meant to show off
his endurance, which he attributed to his way of eating.
He climbed to the top of the Washington Monument that
was eight nineties stairs without stopping, and then he ran

(28:15):
back down. This was not the first or the last
such display. For example, a few years before, for his
fiftieth birthday, he and thirty year old artist Edward W.
Redfield had set off on a two hundred mile bike
ride in France, although Redfield got cramps and had to
take a train back home, while Fletcher went on without him.

(28:36):
Fletcher also became connected to Russell H. Chittenden, who was
director of Sheffield School of Science at Yale University, who
wondered if Fletcher's methods might help him address some of
his own chronic health issues. Shouldn't then invited Fletcher to
the lab for a series of studies. He ran various
tests and experiments. This included analyzing exactly how much Fletcher

(28:59):
was eating, ing and of what, and having him do
various physical trials. It concluded that Fletcher was living on
less food than most people were believed to need, including
eating about a third of the recommended amount of protein,
all while maintaining what seemed like a steady weight, and
he also seemed to be physically healthy. Although Chittenden does

(29:21):
seem to have concluded that Fletcher was physically healthy while
eating a lot less food, he was also pretty selective
about which of Fletcher's ideas he really supported. He thought, really,
really thoroughly chewing food led to better digestion, and that
the reduced calorie and protein intake that was a natural
side effect of this extensive chewing was a good thing.

(29:44):
But he did not support Fletcher's claims that there was
some kind of physiological nutrient gait in the mouth, or
that the mouth included previously unknown digestive organs. Shouldn't then
published an article about his work with Fletcher and Popular
Science in June of nineteen oh three. It's set in
part quote the writer has had in his laboratory for

(30:06):
several months past a gentleman hf who has, for some
five years, in pursuit of a study of the subject
of human nutrition, practiced a certain degree of abstinence in
the taking of food, and attained important economy, with as
he believes, a great gain in bodily and mental vigor,
and with marked improvement in his general health. Under his

(30:30):
new method of living, he finds himself possessed of a
peculiar fitness for work of all kinds, and with freedom
from the ordinary fatigue incidental to extra physical exertion. And
using the word abstinence, possibly a wrong impression is given,
for the habits of life now followed have resulted in
the disappearance of the ordinary craving for food. In other words,

(30:54):
the gentleman in question fully satisfies his appetite, but no
longer desires the amount of food consumed by most individuals.
A lot of Horace Fletcher's writing was focused on feeling better,
both mentally and physically, but he also touched on more
economic ideas, like if poor people started Fletcherizing, they could

(31:15):
better afford to feed their families, and that aspect of
Fletcherism was really attractive to people who were responsible for
figuring out how to feed large groups like the U. S. Army.
The Army sent a medical team to Yale, reportedly some
of the same people who had been part of Walter
Reed's efforts to stop the spread of yellow fever, which

(31:35):
we recently had as a Saturday Classic. The Army wanted
to figure out if soldiers could cut down on the
rations that they needed by employing fletcherizing. Fletcher published another
book in h three called A B two Z of
Our Own Nutrition. Among other things, this described some of
the ongoing research that was happening at that point involving

(31:58):
soldiers at Gale. In it, Fletcher also proposed a series
of questions for readers to ask themselves. Some were pretty straightforward,
like the first question, which was how much do I
know about my own nutrition? Others were a little more fanciful,
including quote, were I an iron and steel automobile instead

(32:19):
of a flesh and blood automobile? Which I really am?
Could I get a license for myself as a chauffeur
to run myself with safety based upon my knowledge of
my own mechanism and the theory and development of my power.
I'm just gonna digest that concept for a moment. Fletcher

(32:41):
also placed a lot of moral and religious weight onto
eating decisions. As one example from this book, he wrote, quote,
how can I religiously ask a blessing upon food and
then immediately sin by treating it in a manner abhorrent
to the natural requirements? In nineteen War Chittenden was still
doing research at Yale, including one study involving three groups

(33:05):
of test subjects. There were brain workers, those were people
who had pretty sedentary jobs. There were members of the
Army Hospital Corps whose activity level was described as moderate,
and there were members of the Varsity crew at Yale
who were doing intensive athletic training. According to Fletcher, the

(33:26):
Army also distributed a set of instructions titled method of
Attaining Economic Assimilation of Nutriment, but the only places that
Tracy found that were in Fletcher's own writing and that
of people citing him. He did, however, serve on the
Committee of one hundred on National Health, as well as
on the other National Commission on Mental Hygiene. At one

(33:47):
point he was also vice president of the Food Reform
Society of England. Although people like Chittenden and various Army
leaders seemed to have been willing to at least invest
a gate Fletcher's claims, he was at odds with a
lot of other people in the evolving field of nutrition.
Fletcherism was nicknamed the Chow Chow cult, and even some

(34:10):
people who cautiously suggested that he might have a point
in terms of people needing to chew their food better. Uh.
They also noted that most of his support was from
people who just subjectively said that they felt better when
they were Fletcherizing their food anecdotes versus data. Meanwhile, Fletcher

(34:32):
was giving speeches and funding research and mailing samples of
his digestive ash to researchers. Famous people who reportedly attended
his lectures included John D. Rockefeller, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
and Upton Sinclair. Franz Kafka was reportedly a Fletcher right,
with his father hiding behind his newspaper during meals so

(34:54):
that he would not have to watch all that chewing.
Two prominent devotes were author Henry James and his brother,
philosopher William James. William discovered Fletcher's work first and sent
a copy of one of his books to his brother.
Both of them were really hoping that they could address
various health concerns through Fletcher's methods. For a time, their

(35:18):
letters to each other included a lot about Fletcher's ideas.
Henry in particular, was, in his own words, zealous, and
he advocated Fletcherism to his friends and literary colleagues, including
Edith Wharton Henry James wrote to Fletcher in nineteen o
five and told him that after adopting his methods, quote,

(35:39):
all my serenity and improvement return. William wrote to the
Harvard Crimson that same year to encourage students and staff
to attend one of Fletcher's lectures, but both brothers had
given up on Fletcherism by nineteen o eight and nineteen
o nine. Apparently Henry ultimately decided that living on so
little food was a miss ruble experience. By that point,

(36:02):
Fletcher had made another trip to Yale for another set
of studies and physical tests. In his own words, at
the age of fifty eight, he did a set of
trials under the observation of a doctor Anderson quote, I
lifted three hundred pounds dead weight three hundred and fifty
times with the muscles of my right leg below the knee.

(36:23):
The record of the best athlete was then one hundred
and seventy five lifts. So I doubled the world's record
of that style of tests of endurance just taking that in.
Russell H. Chitten then published another report in Popular Science
in n seven describing another battery of tests of strength

(36:43):
and endurance. It read in part quote why a man
of fifty nine years of age, without training should be
able to far surpass the record for endurance made by
young and vigorous athletes can only be surmised, but it
certainly seems plausible to assume that the explanation is to
be found in the careful dietary habits which this man
has followed for the past nine years. Still, other people

(37:08):
were not nearly as complimentary. In nineteen o nine, journalist
and theater critic Francis W. Crowninshield published Manners for the Metropolis,
An Entrance Key to the Fantastic Life of the four Hundred.
In this book, Crown and Shield wrote, quote, Fletcher rights
have lately added a new horror to dining out. These

(37:30):
strange creatures seldom repay attention. The best that can be
expected of them as the tense and awful silence which
always accompanies their excruciating tortures of mastication. For context, back
in ward, McAlister had told the New York Tribune that
there were only four hundred people in fashionable New York society,

(37:53):
and that had evolved into a list of who the
four hundred fashionable people were, and a few years After this,
Crown and Shield would become editor of Vanity Fair. In
Fletcher published Fletcherism, What It Is or How I Became
Young at sixty. In it, he wrote, quote, the first
role of Fletcherism is to feel gratitude and to express

(38:16):
appreciation for and of all the blessings which nature, intelligence, civilization,
and imagination bring to mankind. He also boiled Fletcherism down
to five rules. First, wait for a true earned appetite. Second,
select from the food available that which appeals most to appetite,

(38:37):
and in the order called for by appetite. Third, get
all the good taste there is in food, out of
it in the mouth, and swallow only when it practically
swallows itself. Fourth, enjoy the good taste for all it
is worth, and do not allow any depressing or diverting
thought to intrude upon the ceremony. Fifth, weight, take and

(39:01):
enjoy as much as possible what appetite approves. Nature will
do the rest. During World War One, Fletcher started working
with Herbert Hoover on food relief projects in Europe, although
in some accounts this was more like an honorary position
that Fletcher basically appointed himself to. Today, Herbert Hoover is

(39:23):
most known for having been US President at the start
of the Great Depression, and in a lot of ways
he has become a huge scapegoat for that entire financial crisis,
but at this point he was known as the great humanitarian.
Hoover had become a multi millionaire after being orphaned at
a young age, and he had retired from business to

(39:44):
focus pretty much exclusively on philanthropy. If Fletcher's ideas really
were sound, if a person really could live on about
a third of the recommended calories and protein and still
be healthy, that would of course be revolutionary to time
relief efforts. But a number of people pointed out that
there was a huge difference between Army recruits and Yale

(40:07):
athletes being studied in a lab having arrived at that
lab well fed and in good health, and people facing
years of malnutrition, deprivation, hardship, and violence during the war.
Fletcher claimed to have taught Fletcherism to eight millions starving
people in Belgium, But although Russell Chittenden was on the
advisory committee for some of this food relief, and Chittenden

(40:30):
had been researching Fletcher's methods for years, these relief projects
did not formally adopt those methods. Yeah. One of the
articles that I read about this kind of did a
whole thought exercise, like but what if? Actually, I think
it was a podcast hasn't too like but what if?
What if they had? How much differently with things have gone?
If people had been spending all of their time chewing

(40:51):
and and having way less food Anyway, Art Fletcher's story
has an abrupt end. He died on January nineteen, nineteen
in Copenhagen. One obituary described him as seventy years young,
although that same obituary also described him as having asthma
and rheumatism and being nearly blind from cataracts in both eyes.

(41:15):
He's buried in Bellevue Cemetery in Lawrence, Massachusetts. His wife, Grace,
lived on until nine, and his ideas pretty quickly fell
out of fashion after his death, Although there has been
various research since then about exactly how much chewing really
is the right amount and whether there was anything to
this whole idea. They've kind of had varying results. I'm

(41:40):
the healthiest person alive and now I am gone. Thank
you a wild one. Yeah, do you have listener mail
that doesn't involve a lot of chewing fingers cross I
do and it includes no chewing um. This is from
Rachel and Rachel wrote after our blood donation episode, dude
with a little p s A. Rachel said, Hi, there,

(42:02):
I just listened to your blood bank episode and behind
the scenes many and wanted to share a quick p
s A. I also haven't had good experiences donating whole
blood due to borderline anemia, but then I found out
about platelet donation after a friend of mine was battling limphoma.
She's doing great. Now. I'm not a science slash medical person,
but essentially, platelet donation involves taking whole blood out of

(42:25):
one arm, cycling it through a machine to remove the platelets,
and then returning everything else to the other arm. It's
a longer process, about two hours, but depending on your
platelet concentration, they can get up to three units percession,
and in my experience, the donor doesn't feel as faint afterwards,
since you're getting your red blood cells back. It has
to be done at specific locations. I eat not mobile

(42:47):
blood banks since the equipment is large, but they wrap
you in warm blankets while you watch TV, read or
even just sleep. Platelets have a wide use and are
often given to cancer patients, and since they are the
part of your blood that clots, they go bad quickly
and are needed often. And there's a link to the
Red Cross page about that. Um. Rachel says that Tracy,

(43:09):
I know you said you often give whole blood, so
you might not be interested in platelet donation. But I
also live in the Boston area and the m g
H Donation Center is top notch. Thank you for everything
you both do. I love your podcast and the new
behind the scenes many episodes. I've attached a short video
here of our mischievous cat, Penny, who loved opening our
cabinets at our old apartment and hiding among our snacks.

(43:31):
Cheers Rachel Um. That last bit reminds me of a
thing that was going around on TikTok for a while
about people needing a cabinet kitty. People would have a
little video and open the door and there would be
their cabinet kitty. Thank you so much for that, Rachel.
For me personally, I can walk on foot to a
drive where I can give whole blood, and going to

(43:54):
give platelets requires like either a twenty to thirty minute
car trip or much long her on public transportation for
where I live. There just for me personally, like it is,
I'm more able to fit a whole blood donation into
my schedule, but for other people for other reasons, plate
let's work a whole lot better. Well. And I think
I'm probably the person that mentioned that I always get

(44:17):
dinged for having a borderline anemia. And there is a
platelet donation place near me that is fairly new that
I I need to make time to go visit and
check out and see if if I'm a good candidate.
My thing with that is that it is very hard
for me to set aside three hours, yeah, where I

(44:38):
can't be doing seven other things. I was going to
fill in your sentence by saying, holding still for that long.
It's very hard for me. That's like the trick that's
like an anxiety inducer when I'm like, do you mean
I just sit? What if I have to peet? Like
I immediately go to this whole anxiety party train for sure,

(45:00):
But I'm gonna talk to them and see if there's
a way that even the Holly Fries of the world
can do it. Um, I don't know that this would
necessarily help, uh, because part of this is needing or
wanting to be up and around. But um, recently, when
I had a thing that was going to take up
a bunch of my time, I picked something to ben

(45:23):
Binge watch and put it on my iPad so that
I could just take the iPad with me wherever it
was that I needed to be and that helped a lot.
So anyway, thank you so much for that. P s A.
If you would like to send us a note about
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