Chapter IX: How Neatness, Cheerfulness, and Good Manners Promote Health

[Sidenote: Why mealtime should be pleasant]

The dining table should be the pleasantest and most inviting place in the house. If you are complaining and quarreling during the meal, you cannot enjoy the food; you cannot eat it properly; and your ill temper will so affect your body that you cannot properly digest what you eat. A dirty table, with flies swarming over the food, is not very tempting, and when seated at such a table, one does not eat the things that are best for him and sometimes does not eat anything at all.

[Sidenote: How uninviting luncheons affect the appetite]

The luncheons that boys and girls take to school with them are often prepared in so careless a way that they are extremely uninviting. The substantial school lunch can be made just as appetizing as the dainty refreshments at an afternoon tea or at a party. If the same care is devoted to the preparation of the one as of the other, boys and girls will eat their lunches with enjoyment and good appetites.

[Sidenote: Why an attractive table calls for pleasing guests]

If the table is made to look clean and inviting, do you not think that you, in your turn, should make yourself as neat and clean as possible before you come to it? Dirt on your hands and face not only does not look well, but contains a great many germs that may get into your food and thus find their way into your body and try to make you ill.

[Sidenote: How foods should be eaten]

Besides being eaten in pleasant surroundings, all food should be eaten slowly. Let us suppose that we are all seated at a clean, inviting table and everyone is clean and happy. Before the children is the very kind of food that is best for them. It looks good and they know it is good, and they want to eat all they can of it. But they think of a game of jacks or of ball that they want to play as soon as dinner is over, so they simply "bolt" their food.

What are teeth made for? Why, to chew with, of course. But why are we given some teeth that are sharp like knives, and some that are flat like millstones? It seems probable that these different kinds of teeth are intended for special purposes, and so they are. If our teeth were intended only for cutting our food into bits small enough to swallow without causing pain, there would be no need for any except the sharp, knife-like teeth. But we have the big grinders, which were made to use, and it is very important that they be used in the right way.

[Sidenote: Why food should be thoroughly chewed]

We do not chew our food simply to make it fine enough to swallow, but for quite another reason as well. In our mouths there is a fluid called _saliva_. Think of something that you are very fond of eating, and the mere thought of it makes the saliva come into your mouth. This saliva has a very important duty to perform in connection with preparing the food for the little cells of the body. Each little grain of starch--and you will remember that all vegetable foods are composed largely of starch--has a capsule about it. This simply means that it is done up in a little package. The saliva helps to open this capsule by making it soft (just as water will soften the paper on a package of candy), so that the other digestive juices can reach the starch and turn it into the kind of sugar that is used in the body. If you do not chew your food very fine, the saliva will not reach the starch granules, the little packages of starch will be hard to open when they go into the stomach, and much of the starch will never be made use of in the body. The saliva has much the same action on the coverings of the little packages of meat, for all the meat that we eat is done up in similar packages.

A great Englishman, Mr. Gladstone, who lived to be eighty-three, made a practice of chewing every bite of food twenty times, and he thought this had a great deal to do with his being such a strong and well man and living to such an old age.

[Sidenote: When desserts are not harmful]

After you have eaten meats, bread, and vegetables, it will do no harm to eat a piece of pie or cake, or a dish of ice-cream or some other dessert. It is not easy, as a rule, to digest these things (that is, to get them into such shape that they can be used as food by the little cells in the body), but a moderate amount of them is very good for boys and girls, as well as for grown people. If you refuse to eat the meat and bread, but wait until the dessert is served and then fill your stomach with sweet things, you will be starving some of the little cells, and you will be reminded of this very soon. Sometimes you may be reminded of it by having a pain in your stomach, but more often by getting low grades in your lessons at school. Your teacher will know it, too, because you will be so restless and inattentive in your classes that she will have to give you a low grade in deportment as well.

=Questions.= 1. What kind of topics should be discussed at
mealtime? 2. What is the objection to an untidy table? 3. What
kind of luncheon do you like best? 4. What does a clean table
call for? 5. What is the importance of eating slowly? 6. Why
should we chew our food thoroughly? 7. When are desserts not
harmful?

=Remember.= 1. The dining table should be the most inviting
place in the house. 2. Unpleasant subjects should be avoided at
mealtime. 3. A clean table calls for clean people. 4. Eat slowly
and chew your food thoroughly, that the saliva may reach each
grain of starch. 5. Desserts are not harmful if eaten at the end
of a meal composed of good building and heat-producing materials.