EVERYONE WITH AN OSTOMY should fletcherize. Don’t look it up; you won’t find it. My handy-dandy book of word origins says it means (or, I suppose, meant, back in the early 20th C.) “to masticate food thoroughly.” A nutritionist named Horace Fletcher (1849-1919) advocated cutting out regular meals and eating only when hungry, consuming small amounts of food at one time, and chewing each tiny mouthful vigorously and thoroughly before swallowing. Fletcher promoted the idea of 32 chews to the bite, a concept he actually borrowed from British PM Gladstone who “made it a rule, to give every tooth of mine a chance.” For those of us with less than the full count of 32 teeth, I’m sure that Fletcher would recommend we still give each mouthful the same abundance of mastication.