“Nature will castigate those who don’t masticate” was one of the catchy slogans invented by Horace Fletcher, a self-styled dietician who, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, convinced thousands of people to chew each mouthful of food thirty-two times, a number partly determined by most people having thirty-two teeth. This was not Fletcher’s only contribution to nutrition, but it is the one that became attached to his name: fletcherize appeared in 1903 as a verb meaning to chew thoroughly. Fletcher’s surname, incidentally, means arrow-maker, a job presumably held by one of his ancestors.