degenerative neurological condition, tumor irradiation—and the seamless, moist ballet begins to fall apart. The umbrella term is dysphagia (from the Greek for “disordered eating,” which may or may not explain flaming Greek cheese appetizers).
Most of the time, while you’re just breathing and not swallowing, the larynx (voice box) blocks the entrance to the esophagus (food tube). When a mouthful of food or drink is ready to be swallowed, the larynx has to rise out of the way, both to yield access to the esophagus and to close off the windpipe and prevent the food from being inhaled. To allow this to happen, the bolus is held momentarily at the back of the tongue, a sort of anatomical metering light. If, as a result of dysphagia, the larynx doesn’t move quickly enough, the food can head down the windpipe instead. This is, obviously, a choking hazard. More sinisterly, inhaled food and drink can deliver a troublesome load of bacteria. Infection can set in and progress to pneumonia.
A less lethal and more entertaining swallowing misstep is nasal regurgitation. Here the soft palate—home turf of the uvula, * that queer little oral stalactite—fails to seal the opening to the nasal cavity. This leaves milk, say, or chewed peas in peril of being horked out the nostrils. Nasal regurgitation is more common with children, because they are often laughing while eating and because their swallowing mechanism isn’t fully developed.
“Immature swallowing coordination” is the reason 90 percent of food-related choking deaths befall children under the age of five. Also contributing: immature dentition. Kids grow incisors before they have molars; for a brief span of time they can bite off pieces of food but cannot chew them. Round foods are particularly treacherous because they match the shape of the trachea. If, say, a grape goes down the wrong way, it blocks the tube so completely that no breath can be drawn around it. A child is better off inhaling a plastic barnyard animal or toy soldier, because air can be inhaled through its legs or around its rifle. Hotdogs, grapes, and round candies take the top three slots in a list of killer foods published in the July 2008 issue of the International Journal of Pediatric Otorhinolaryngology , itself a calamitous mouthful. Jennifer Long, a professor of head and neck surgery at the University of California, Los Angeles, went so far as to declare hotdogs a public health issue. A candy called Lychee Mini Fruity Gels has killed enough times for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to have banned its import.
Every now and then a food comes along that is so difficult to orally process that even healthy adults without dysphagia have trouble getting it down. Sticky rice mochi, a traditional Japanese New Years food, kills about a dozen people every year—along with puffer fish and flaming cheese, the world’s riskiest menu items.
The safest foods, of course, are those that arrive on the plate premoistened and machine-masticated, leaving little for your own built-in processor to do. They are also, generally speaking, the least popular. Mushy food is a form of sensory deprivation. In the same way that a dark, silent room will eventually drive you to hallucinate, the mind rebels against bland, single-texture foods, edibles that do not engage the oral device. Mush is for babies. Those who can, want to chew. The story of U.S. military rations bears this out. During World War II, when combat rations were tinned, meat hashes were a common entrée because they worked well with the filling machines. “But the men wanted something they could chew, something into which they could ‘sink their teeth,’” wrote food scientist Samuel Lepkovsky in a 1964 paper making the case against a liquid diet for the Gemini astronauts. He summed up the soldiers’ take on potted meat: “We could undoubtedly survive on these rations a lot longer than we’d care to live.” (NASA went ahead and tested an
Most of the time, while you’re just breathing and not swallowing, the larynx (voice box) blocks the entrance to the esophagus (food tube). When a mouthful of food or drink is ready to be swallowed, the larynx has to rise out of the way, both to yield access to the esophagus and to close off the windpipe and prevent the food from being inhaled. To allow this to happen, the bolus is held momentarily at the back of the tongue, a sort of anatomical metering light. If, as a result of dysphagia, the larynx doesn’t move quickly enough, the food can head down the windpipe instead. This is, obviously, a choking hazard. More sinisterly, inhaled food and drink can deliver a troublesome load of bacteria. Infection can set in and progress to pneumonia.
A less lethal and more entertaining swallowing misstep is nasal regurgitation. Here the soft palate—home turf of the uvula, * that queer little oral stalactite—fails to seal the opening to the nasal cavity. This leaves milk, say, or chewed peas in peril of being horked out the nostrils. Nasal regurgitation is more common with children, because they are often laughing while eating and because their swallowing mechanism isn’t fully developed.
“Immature swallowing coordination” is the reason 90 percent of food-related choking deaths befall children under the age of five. Also contributing: immature dentition. Kids grow incisors before they have molars; for a brief span of time they can bite off pieces of food but cannot chew them. Round foods are particularly treacherous because they match the shape of the trachea. If, say, a grape goes down the wrong way, it blocks the tube so completely that no breath can be drawn around it. A child is better off inhaling a plastic barnyard animal or toy soldier, because air can be inhaled through its legs or around its rifle. Hotdogs, grapes, and round candies take the top three slots in a list of killer foods published in the July 2008 issue of the International Journal of Pediatric Otorhinolaryngology , itself a calamitous mouthful. Jennifer Long, a professor of head and neck surgery at the University of California, Los Angeles, went so far as to declare hotdogs a public health issue. A candy called Lychee Mini Fruity Gels has killed enough times for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to have banned its import.
Every now and then a food comes along that is so difficult to orally process that even healthy adults without dysphagia have trouble getting it down. Sticky rice mochi, a traditional Japanese New Years food, kills about a dozen people every year—along with puffer fish and flaming cheese, the world’s riskiest menu items.
The safest foods, of course, are those that arrive on the plate premoistened and machine-masticated, leaving little for your own built-in processor to do. They are also, generally speaking, the least popular. Mushy food is a form of sensory deprivation. In the same way that a dark, silent room will eventually drive you to hallucinate, the mind rebels against bland, single-texture foods, edibles that do not engage the oral device. Mush is for babies. Those who can, want to chew. The story of U.S. military rations bears this out. During World War II, when combat rations were tinned, meat hashes were a common entrée because they worked well with the filling machines. “But the men wanted something they could chew, something into which they could ‘sink their teeth,’” wrote food scientist Samuel Lepkovsky in a 1964 paper making the case against a liquid diet for the Gemini astronauts. He summed up the soldiers’ take on potted meat: “We could undoubtedly survive on these rations a lot longer than we’d care to live.” (NASA went ahead and tested an
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