My Teeth (2)

I spent much of this morning counting my pearly-white teeth. It appears that I have 29 of them, with no significant gaps. The left hand side of my mouth has more teeth than the right hand side, however. Hitherto, I had tended to chew using this right hand set but, on reflection, have decided that this is obviously a very inefficient use of my mouth. I therefore now intend to start chewing primarily on the left hand side, as the greater of number of teeth will obviously make eating a lot faster and more satisfying.

In my opinion, food packaging should be labelled with an indication of how long the contents will take to eat for any given number of teeth. This would work in a similar way to microwave cooking instructions. For instance, just as a 750 Watt oven might be described as taking three minutes to cook a particular dish and a 650 Watt oven four minutes, so 15 teeth (assuming you eat using just one side of your mouth) might take, in total, two minutes to chew the food as opposed to two and a half if you only have 12.

Indeed, further to this, I feel we should redefine the concept of “fast” food. Rather than being a description of the speed of its cooking, it should refer, instead, to the speed of eating. Some sort of legal upper limit should be imposed, too, for safety reasons, constantly monitored by kitchen and restaurant-mounted closed circuit television cameras and GATSOs. This is because, if you ate too fast while consuming something slippery or irregularly shaped, you could slide off it and accidentally chew off the arm of someone sitting next to you. Accordingly, if people exceeded these speed limits, Food Police should be empowered to hand out on-the-spot penalties. Those miscreants who accrued more than 12 penalty points during any given period would be banned from eating for a period not exceeding 6 months. Persistent offendors should be banned from having teeth altogether.

In this way, eating would once again become a refined, civilized activity.