If you have the habit of inhaling food up your left nostril instead of chewing and savouring every morsel, Chuck Palahniuk offers a solution in his novel Rant: An Oral History of Buster Casey.

In the story, Irene Casey, mother and church potluck celebrity recalls how she trained her two boys Chet and Buddy to eat slowly.

You see, they used to be classic "inhalers", wolfing down her laboriously-prepared cakes and casseroles without tasting, or even thinking about the meal. That was until she started "accidentally" leaving cherry pits in the peach cobbler or sharp shards of walnut shell in her famous apple brown cake.

For fear of breaking their jaws or shredding the inside of their mouths to bloody ribbons, the two boys quickly learned to consciously chew slower. From the book:

"When you ate her tuna casserole, you didn't flip through a National Geographic. Your eyes and ears stayed inside your mouth. Your whole world kept inside your mouth, feeling and careful for the little balled-up tinfoils Irene Casey would hide in the tuna parts.

A side effect of eating slow was, you naturally, genuinely tasted, and the food tasted better."

 

I'm not advocating inserting foreign objects or inedible items into food (come on now). I'm trying to underscore the importance of chewing food cautiously and slowly. 

It's better for digestion; it helps you feel fuller, faster, and because there are no taste buds in your nasal cavities.

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