The poet Philip Larkin put his finger on it years ago with: They f*** you up your mom and dad. He could have also added ‘teachers’ and adults in general (and of course we in turn f*** up our children, but that need not detain us here).
Among the many bad habits we had as children that were beaten or scared or threatened out of us was the manner in which we ate our food: chewing with the mouth open. Now we are told that the adults were wrong, and all those threats and warnings we received as children were misplaced. We were told then that if we persisted in eating with our mouths open, we would grow tusks like elephants.
Far from discouraging open-mouthed chewing, it actually encouraged us to eat that way – after all, which child could resist the idea of growing tusks? It would have been the same if we were told we would grow a tail or an extra ear on our foreheads – children love that stuff, something Marvel comics monetised long ago.
When that didn’t work (and we are disappointed), we were told that our teeth would fall out, that no one would marry us, that someone we loved would die. Adults could be as cruel as children.
Some were told that ghosts would haunt them at night, others that … well, you get the idea. Many asked sensible questions: how come we had never seen a child with tusks, surely someone must have broken the rule? Or, don’t ghosts have anything better to do?
Now we are finally being told the truth. Researchers at Oxford University have discovered that eating with your mouth open can actually make food taste better. We had more sense – scientific sense, mind you – than the adults, but we couldn’t express that because our mouths were full, and another rule was that you couldn’t talk with your mouth full.
Anyway, researchers tell us that chewing with our mouths open (hereinafter referred to as ‘CWOMO’) helps release more volatile organic compounds which contribute to the sense of smell and overall eating experience. Experimental psychologist (to quote an authority on the subject) Charles Spence says we should all be doing it.
For the technically-minded, here’s the reasoning: CWOMO helps the more aromatic compounds reach the back of the nose, thus (as we all know) kick-starting the olfactory sensory neurons and heightens our experience of eating. We kids couldn’t have put it better back then, but we weren’t given a chance.
So what else were we doing right but not in the eyes of adults?
Perhaps it is fine to eat with your elbows on the table, and those adults who screamed at us for doing this have probably all been eaten by dragons by now. We await word from researchers telling us that elbows on the table make digestion easier or prevent acid reflux or something.
Perhaps we needn’t have worried about making slurping noises while drinking our milk. I weep for my generation.
(Suresh Menon is Contributing Editor, The Hindu).
