Expert Says People Choking Because They 'Forgotten How To Chew Food!'

Chipper Adams is a humble man. During his heyday as a rally ace, fame didn’t gyrate to his head. He took it in his stride and ‘got on’. Apart from his given title of ‘Mr’ which, he got from birth because he was born male, his career afforded him another title - that of ‘corner specialist’.

I am no rally fan because I don’t click the all the fuss of driving down to the depths of Mpigi or wherever to watch rally cars scuttle past. What excitement does one derive out of being covered in a dust bowl as the cars hurtle by and then having to pay a visit to Otolaryngologist to have your ears syringed? Getting back, I guess Adams earned the corner specialist title because of the way he drove round the corners. I think.  

I’m no expert at anything and do yearn to be one, because other synonyms for expert are; maestro, virtuoso, genius, connoisseur, aficionado, cognoscente, and being described as one of those, would tremendously boost my ego.

The only problem about being an expert is that you eventually go cuckoos and the alumni list of experts who lost the plot is impressive enough. Nobel Prize winner, the novelist Earnest Hemingway was a paranoid who believed that FBI was spying on him. Vincent Van Gogh suffered from psychotic episodes and delusions and at one point in a rage, he severed part of his own left ear and later began to alternate between fits of madness and lucidity. Isaac Newton, while famous, laden with honours and internationally acclaimed as one of the world’s foremost thinkers, he was deeply insecure, given to fits of depression and outbursts of violent temper.

A couple of weeks ago, Expert at the Office for National Statistics in the UK, revealed that – and wait for it, wait for it, ‘adults have forgotten how to chew their properly which, has resulted in a 17% rise of people who have died from choking in England, Scotland and Wales in 2016.’

Let’s wait once more while I try to get my head round this and also throw in a WTF for good measure. I read the article as I was waited for lunch to be served and it just didn’t make any sense so I put it to the test and no matter how hard I tried to blank the brain, I still remembered how to chew because chewing is a spontaneous action.

1. Put food in mouth.

2. Move jaw up and down.

3. Chew until food is liquefied or lost all of its texture.

4. Swallow and repeat process.

However, in his report, Expert does not reveal exactly how people forgot to chew. 1. Did people put food in mouth and just couldn’t remember what to do next? 2. Perhaps they were asleep during the biology class? While I am no medical expert, I conclude there are some pretty stupid people living in the UK.

On the flip, I used to like writing – having a Parker fountain pen in my fingers and watching it glide over paper with relative ease. Today, all my writing isn’t written, but typed out on the laptop or tablet and thinking about it, I can go a month without picking up a pen until some weeks back when filling in some forms. Almost as hard as it is to believe there are people out there who have forgotten how to chew food, there are people who have forgotten how to write. I essentially had to sit back and think for a while how the letters Q and G were written in lower casing. 

Hmm, perhaps there are also some pretty stupid people living in Uganda?

Pictures: Daily Monitor, Agencies