As only a hotel doctor has time for, van Someren set to work gathering the data both men knew Fletcher would need to gain approval in scientific circles. Fletcher had experimented on himself, but these efforts were unlikely to convince the research community. He had simply weighed and recorded each day’s bodily input and output for both himself and “my man Carl,” over the course of a bicycle trip through France. As Fletcher described the scenario, in a letter to one of his benefactors in 1900, Carl was “a young Tyrolean . . . in national costume” hired to carry the scale and “wheel my bicycle up the grades and be generally useful.”
Van Someren presented a paper at a meeting of the British Medical Association in 1901, and again at the International Congress of Physiology. Skeptical but intrigued, well-placed scientists at London’s Royal Society and at Cambridge University, and Yale’s Russell Chittenden* undertook follow-up studies, with mixed conclusions. In 1904, thirteen lads of the Hospital Corps Detachment of the U.S. Army were taken away from their nursing duties for six months to serve as guinea pigs in a test of Fletcher and Chittenden’s low-calorie, low-protein, super-mastication regimen. Here there was no strapping lad in knickers and feathered felt hat to do the weighing and tidying up. The men’s work began at 6:45 A.M. with an hour and a half of “duties about the quarters, such as . . . assisting in measurement of urine and faeces and transportation of the same to the laboratory; cleansing of faeces cans and urine bottles, etc.”
Chittenden claimed to have evidence that the Fletcher system enabled a man to get by on two-thirds the calories and half the protein recommended by the current nutrition guidelines. Though the claims were roughly critiqued and largely dismissed by other scientists, they struck a chord with victualers: military officers and others whose jobs entailed feeding hungry hordes on limited budgets. In the United States and Europe, administrators at workhouses, prisons, and schools flirted with Fletcherism. The U.S. Army Medical Department issued formal instructions for a “Method of Attaining Economic Assimilation of Nutriment”—aka the Fletcher system. (“Masticate all solid food until it is completely liquefied,” begins the familiar refrain.) In 1917, Chittenden became a scientific advisor to Herbert Hoover, then the head of the U.S. Food Administration. Fletcher, living in Belgium during World War I and already chummy with the U.S. ambassador there, parlayed these two connections into his gig as an “honorary alimentary expert” for Hoover’s relief commission. Together, he and Chittenden did their best to convince Hoover to make Fletcherism part of U.S. economic policy, thereby justifying a two-thirds reduction in the amount of civilian rations shipped overseas. Hoover sagely resisted.
Fletcher’s true colors could occasionally be seen through the seams of his cream-colored suits. After bragging, in a 1910 letter, that a family of five could save enough money to furnish a five-room flat in fifteen months by Fletcherizing, he adds, “Of course, the furnishings must be of the simplest sort.” This from a man who lived for years in a suite at the Waldorf Astoria. He summed up his policies at the end of the letter: “Expert economics coming to the assistance of ambitious unintelligence.” Let them chew cake.
The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw a cavalcade of possibly well-meaning but probably just greedy individuals attempting to feed the poor on a shoestring budget. In the case of Jean d’Arcet Sr. and Jr., actual leather laces would have provided more nourishment than what the two proposed. In 1817, d’Arcet Jr., a chemist by trade, came up with a method for extracting gelatin from bones (and money from Parisian welfare coffers). Public hospitals and poorhouses, having swallowed the preposterous claim that two ounces of d’Arcet’s gelatin was the nutritional equivalent of three-plus pounds of meat, began serving soup made with the gelatin.
So plentiful were the complaints that in 1831, physicians at an infamous Paris hospital for the poor, H?tel-Dieu, ran an experiment comparing traditional bouillon with gelatin-based broth. The latter was “more distasteful, more putrescible, less digestible, less nutritious, and . . . moreover, it often brought on diarrhea.” The French Academy of Sciences sprang into inaction, appointing a committee to look into it. The Gelatin Commission would dither for ten years before finally issuing a thumbs-down. Gelatin fed to animals, the committee reported, was found to “excite an intolerable distaste to a degree which renders starvation preferable.”