eat your teeth

the history of dentures is absolutely fascinating. Oh, OK it isn’t but there are a few salient points that you may be unfamiliar with.

replacements for decayed or lost teeth have been produced for thousands of years. The Etruscans made skilfully designed false teeth out of ivory and bone, secured by gold bridgework, as early as 700 B.C. unfortunately, this level of sophistication for false teeth was not regained until the 1800s.

during medieval times, the practice of dentistry was largely confined to tooth extraction; replacement was seldom considered. when false teeth were installed, they were hand-carved and tied in place with silk threads & if not enough natural teeth remained, anchoring false ones was difficult. people who wore full sets of dentures had to remove them when they wanted to eat which is rather a weird concept in itself. upper and lower plates were fitted poorly and were held together with steel springs; disconcertingly, the set of teeth could spring suddenly out of the wearer's mouth. now that must have been a bundle of laughs!

since antiquity, the most common material for false teeth was animal bone or ivory, especially from elephants or hippos (no-one we know obviously). human teeth were also used, pulled from the dead or sold by poor people from their own mouths.

you may have perceived by now that a new kind of denture is most urgently required. I propose that our dentists make a precise mould for our new teeth which is forwarded to our chosen confectionery processing plant that makes up a batch of, say 100 edible sets of teeth at a time. these packs may last us a couple of months. the producer holds our mould on file for repeat orders until such a time as we desire a new moulding as the shape of the mouth changes.

now with these new kinds of dentures, at the end of the day, instead of removing them to soak in a glass overnight, we just eat them for supper or if we are taken by hunger during the day, say in the train or at the office, we just snack on some or all of our teeth. I am thinking along the lines of say a firmish jelly for the gums and a little white (possibly not) shiny boiled sweet for the teeth themselves. Yum yum.