Speaking from books, the tongue is essentially a mass of muscles that are covered by a mucous membrane and is mainly responsible for a taste sensation. Its primary role is in eating; manipulating food into a bolus from where it can be safely passed into the throat with swallowing. However, its secondary and equally important role is speech. Also, it is considered that tongue helps in breathing when you are asleep.
Function of Tongue
There cannot be enough emphasis on how important this organ can be in the prospect of food intake. Let us take a bit deeper look and see what exactly happens in our mouths. When you eat food, it is the responsibility of teeth to break it down to smaller pieces to be digestible. The tongue comes in this phase, adds saliva as a lubricant, and actively moves the food within the mouth in order to position it for further degradation by the teeth. Furthermore, the tongue can also help with oral cleansing as it can play in to keep food from prolonged contact with the teeth.
Can we eat without a Tongue?
The answer is Yes, we can. Absence of your tongue will not stop you from eating food, it’s just that you won’t be able to perceive its taste any more. Mo salt or spices at all, something like hospital food always. The fact that food is a basic necessity of living, one can keep alive with or without having a tongue, as long as the digestive tract is working fine.
The job of the oral cavity, however, will get much simpler. As the tongue acts as to roll the food in the mouth for chewing and breakdown, without the presence of a tongue, all eaten would directly be swallowed to the digestive tract via the esophagus to the stomach. Where all the nutrients would be extracted, and all converted into useful energy, which will be driven in all bloodstreams.
So, the crux of tongue and food argument is that, without tongue, there would be no taste and charm in the food, however, if we intake food for what is its primary purpose; keeping us alive and energized, we
Examples of eating without a tongue
The condition of not having a natural tongue since birth is called Aglossia. There are only 11 documented cases of natural Aglossia in the world right now, so it is of course a pretty exclusive club. But, despite getting birth without a tongue, they can all speak and swallow in their respective ways. Some of them have the base of the tongue with muscle on the floor of my mouth, which can move up and down, and that somehow also serves as their taste buds too. A lot of them struggle with speaking, as they lack basic organ shape for producing required sounds of words for speech. But nature never leaves anyone alone. Though very unnatural, most of them, with passing life, learn to communicate with lesser sounds and pronunciations. But one thing is for sure, they all can eat without any extra effort.
