* Meat and patriotism do not fit naturally together, and sloganeering proved a challenge. The motto “Food Fights for Freedom” would seem to inspire cafeteria mayhem more than personal sacrifice.
* Pledge madness peaked in 1942. The June issue of Practical Home Economics reprinted a twenty-item Alhambra, California, Student Council antiwaste pledge that included a promise to “drive carefully to conserve rubber” and another to “get to class on time to save paper on tardy slips.” Perhaps more dire than the shortages in metal, meat, paper, and rubber was the “boy shortage” mentioned in an advice column on the same page. “Unless you do something about it, this means empty hours galore!” Luckily, the magazine had some suggestions. An out-of-fashion bouclé suit could be “unraveled, washed, tinted and reknitted” to make baby clothes. Still bored? “Take two worn rayon dresses and combine them to make one Sunday-best that looks brand new”—and fits like a dream if you are a giant insect or person with four arms.
* They are to be excused for not tasting it too. Amniotic fluid contains fetal urine (from swallowed amniotic fluid) and occasionally meconium: baby’s first feces, composed of mucus, bile, epithelial cells, shed fetal hair, and other amniotic detritus. The Wikipedia entry helpfully contrasts the tarry, olive-brown smear of meconium—photographed in a tiny disposable diaper—with the similarly posed yellowish excretion of a breastfed newborn, both with an option for viewing in the magnified resolution of 1,280 × 528 pixels.
* Bull was chief of the University of Illinois Meats Division and founding patron of the Sleeter Bull Undergraduate Meats Award. Along with meat scholarship, Bull supported and served as grand registrar of the Alpha Gamma Rho fraternity, where they knew a thing or two about undergraduate meats.
* The other common source of Lcysteine is feathers. Blech has a theory that this might explain the medicinal value of chicken soup, a recipe for which can be found in the Gemorah (shabbos 145b) portion of the Talmud. Lcysteine, he says, is similar to the mucus-thinning drug acetylcysteine. And it is found, albeit in lesser amounts, in birds’ skin. “Chicken soup and its Lcysteine,” Blech said merrily, may indeed be “just what the doctor ordered.”
4
The Longest Meal
CAN THOROUGH CHEWING LOWER THE NATIONAL DEBT?
THE HORACE FLETCHER papers reside in a single cardboard box of a size that would hold a lightweight cardigan. The self-dubbed economic nutritionist did not attend Harvard,* but it is Harvard that came to own his letters, now stored in some dim recess of the Houghton Library. It was a spring day in May when I visited them. Outside the open windows, a run-through of commencement was under way, speeches being delivered before a plain of empty chairs. I recall feeling relieved by the compactness of the collection, for it appeared it could be gone through in a couple of hours, leaving time to enjoy the warm, chlorophyll-brightened Cambridge afternoon.
The box was deceptive. Fletcher had typed on the thinnest of onion-skin typing paper. As the years wore on, his margins grew smaller and smaller, often disappearing entirely. Fletcher was an efficiency buff, and his obsession appears to have carried over to his habits as a letter writer. Just as he believed in extracting the most nourishment possible from a mouthful of food, he sought to extract the maximum use from each sheet of stationery. Around 1913, he switched from double-to single-spacing and began typing on both sides of the page. Because the paper was thin to the point of transparency, Fletcher’s words bled through, causing some of the missives, though typed, to be practically illegible.
What I am getting at is that there is a point at which efficiency crosses over into lunacy, and the savings in money or resources cease to be worthwhile in light of the price paid in other ways. Horace Fletcher danced around that point his whole career. What amazes me is the degree to which he was taken seriously.