The Big Book of Gross Stuff

by Bart King

  What? Brain snot?! What a nincompoop! Some father of medicine Hippocrates turned out to be!

  Brain snot aside, I can’t make up my mind about which one of these words I like best: mucus, snot, phlegm, or sputum. They’re all so awesome! But there are slight differences between them:

  mucus: This thick, gooey stuff is in your nose and throat. And it’s also inside your digestive system, lungs, and urinary tract. Its job is to coat, soothe, and protect—like Pepto Bismol! Mucus also does a great job of trapping all the dust and nasty junk that you breathe in every day.

  snot: This word applies strictly to the mucus that lines your sinuses.

  phlegm: This word is generally used for the mucus that you clear out of your throat. You might cough up or swallow phlegm, but you wouldn’t blow it out your schnozz.

  sputum: Once you’ve coughed up your phlegm and spat it out, voilà! It’s called sputum. You can also call it a loogie if you want.

  Nasal Monument

  The Mimizuka is a Japanese war monument dedicated to the country’s battle with Korea in the late 1500s, in which samurai warriors enshrined the noses and ears of over thirty thousand Korean soldiers. (These were easier to transport back to Japan than the usual samurai warrior prize: the whole head.)

  I know what you’re thinking: “But what about boogers?” Okay, here’s the recipe for boogers. The inside of your nose is coated with moisture, a bit of salt, and a dash of a sticky protein called mucin. Together, these form the mucus that traps nasty things like dust and germs that you breathe. It’s better to trap that junk in your nose than to allow it into your lungs.

  After the mucus in your nose traps enough of this stuff, it will dry up and turn into a booger. But be sure to let your boogers ripen, for Pete’s sake! If your mucus never dries but instead remains in its liquid “snot” stage, you have two choices: you can blow it out or swallow it. I know, that sounds harsh. But I had to prepare you for the following heart-rending story.

  Who Wants to Make Snot?

  Need to make some snot? (Not from your nose, that is?) Here’s how:

  Get some Cheese Whiz. Add a dash of green food coloring to it. Experiment until you get the color right. And you’re done! This green cheesy substance is ideal for dipping chips. Or hide some in a handkerchief and pretend to sneeze or blow your nose into it. Fun for the whole family!

  A Heart-Rending Story

  Like any first-grade kid, I did plenty of snuffling and swallowing when I had a cold. But I almost had a heart attack when a friend of mine named Brian gave a big snort and then showed me a bunch of green loogies . . . in his mouth. How did those get there? When I realized the horrible truth (I’ve been swallowing snot?!), I went to great lengths to blow my nose for minutes afterward.

  What’s weird is that I’d never really understood that if my mouth opened to my throat, and my nose opened to my throat, then my mouth and my nose were connected! This relationship was confirmed when I was riding my bike yesterday. I was breathing hard through my mouth and nose. Suddenly, a large black flying bug swooped toward my face and got too close to my nostrils as I was breathing in.

  I snorted that big bug right up my nose! But he was moving so fast, he flew through my sinuses in no time, and the next thing I knew he was in my throat. I gave a cough, and out came the bug. The poor little guy must have been covered in booger juice and spit. But somehow he reached down deep and flew bravely off into the sunset.

  But for a moment, I bet his whole life flashed before my nostril.

  Pick Your Style!

  Brain Stabbing: This is when you burrow so deeply for a booger, you jab your frontal lobe.

  The Blessing of Privacy: Looks like no one is around! Time to do some finger-stretching exercises and dig in. (And just when you’re making progress, you find that someone’s been watching you all along!)

  The Curse of Rhinorrhea: You try and try, but your nose is so runny, you can’t get any traction.

  Nasal Deception: Upon initial exploration, the booger seems solid and ready for harvest. But once it’s removed, the booger is actually long, slimy, and impossible to get rid of! Get me a hanky, stat!

  I’m Innocent, I Tell Ya!: You were not picking your nose. It had to be a weird optical illusion that made it look like you were! If you find yourself unjustly accused, ask the prosecution to present its evidence. (Y’know, the actual booger.)

  The Attempt to Capitalize on the Curse of Innocence: Nothing to see here! I’m just stretching my arms . . . yep, I might scratch my nose for a moment . . . well, if nobody is watching, I might just check my inventory . . . got one!

  Getting Lucky: You just absentmindedly swiped your nose and dislodged a booger behemoth. Score!

  Keep Your Fingers Out of It

  Let me share some of the interesting studies that have been done on mucus. For example, a scientist studying nose-picking wrote: “This first population survey of nose-picking suggests that it is an almost universal practice in adults.”

  What’s amazing to me isn’t that kids pick their noses, but that apparently all adults do too! And I’d always thought that this was a joke:

  Question: What do you find inside a clean nose?

  Answer: Fingerprints.

  While nose-picking is universal, there is a segment of our population that does something society really frowns upon. Apparently, three out of every hundred nose-pickers picks a winner and then eats it. This means that 3 percent of everyone you know eats boogers.

  I’ve been looking up my own nostrils as research, and there are actual hairs up there! This makes me sad because ever since I was younger (like, yesterday), I’ve mocked men who have visible hair in their nose. Sometimes this nose hair is so long and beefy, it hangs out of the nostrils. Worst of all is when it grows out of the nostrils and then merges with the man’s moustache!

  Anyway, these big nose hairs are called vibrissae. Like the rest of your nostrils, they get coated with mucus. This allows the vibrissae to help catch passing bits of pollution, dust, and grit. So while a man with thick nose hair is disgusting, his upper sinuses actually contain fewer boogers than the rest of ours do!

  There are other much smaller hairs that go live farther up your nostrils. These are called cilia, and they actually move back and forth on their own.

  Yes, you have moving hairs in your nose. Congratulations!

  This movement by the cilia works your mucus to the back of your throat at a speed of an inch every four minutes. When the mucus eventually gets to the back of your throat, you either swallow it or hack it up! There are cilia in your lungs doing the same thing, but down there, the little hairs move irritants UP to your throat so you can get rid of them.

  Things that stop your cilia from working include:

  Infection! If your sinuses clog up due to infection, the mucus can’t be moved out to your throat, and your cilia give up trying. Allergies can also cause this. Result: Mucus drips down from the back of the nose, causing you to wipe your nostrils a lot. (This is called post-nasal drip.)

  Temperature Changes! Going from warm air to cold air will temporarily freeze up your cilia. Result: Clear mucus will run from your nostrils.

  Brain Snot! I’ve been reading Hippocrates’ notes, and he says that if a person has a headache, the brain will not be able to make mucus properly. Result: Brain snot? What an idiot!

  If your cilia detect something in your nose that doesn’t belong there, like a germ, a pea, or some pepper, they will go on green alert. This will result in a sternutation.

  I hope you had a tissue.

  Well, I guess that’s it. Oh wait, I have something REALLY important to tell you. Remember how I couldn’t make up my mind on what word to use?

  I prefer phlegm. Now go in peace.

  * * *

  [14] And it’s always a woman. Who ever heard of a beauty mark on a man?

  [15] The killing of larvae.

  Food, Drink, and Other Harmless Hazards

  Some of the things y
ou eat are truly disgusting. But hey, it’s not your fault. How were you supposed to know you’ve been eating cigarette butts?

  Don’t feel bad. Heck, I’ve been chowing down on maggots for years. What choice do I have? I like food. And almost all packaged foods contain something nasty. For example, a can of mushrooms is legally allowed to contain twenty maggots for every hundred grams of mushrooms. It’s the law! In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) legally defines maggots as “harmless hazards.”

  “How can a hazard be harmless?” you ask. “That’s like healthy poison!” Oh, it’s all written up in a booklet called The Food Defect Action Levels. This booklet is a double whammy: it’s really boring and really gross. If you muck your way through it, you’ll learn that all of the following items are “harmless hazards”:

  insects and their eggs

  insect filth (excrement)

  insect larvae (maggots!)

  mammal poop (usually rat poop)

  mold

  mildew

  parasites

  rodent filth and hair

  Maybe worst of all is the category called “foreign matter.” It’s made up of “sticks, stones, burlap bagging, cigarette butts, etc.” Sticks and stones? Those can break your bones! (And what about your small intestine?) In addition to “foreign matter,” foods like hot dogs can have the ground-up snout, ear, stomach, or esophagus (the “food tube”) of a pig in them. But you won’t find these items listed on the label of ingredients. Instead you’ll see “with by-products” or “with variety meats.” When it comes to “variety meats,” you can count me out!

  ryphophagy: To eat something disgusting.

  What this all means is that, on average, you eat two pounds of mites, flies, and maggots every year. That is totally gross. It’s also almost totally harmless, because it turns out that these items really won’t hurt you in the small amounts that they occur.

  It’s apparently impossible to keep flies and rats out of our food. As the FDA says, it’s “impractical to grow, harvest, or process raw products that are totally free of non-hazardous, naturally occurring, unavoidable defects.” Rats! That is to say, we can’t keep rats and flies away from our food. Okay, okay. (But about those cigarette butts?)

  What’s for Dessert?

  The Web site www.candyaddict.com lists the ten most disgusting candies ever made. Some of these sickening sweets include Hose Nose (a slimy candy picked from a plastic nose), Sour Flush (sort of like Pixy Stix in a little toilet), Chocka Ca-Ca (talk about overkill!), earwax candy (it comes in a fake ear), and Candy Scabs (fake Band-Aids with fake scabs).

  Actually, you know what? I’m full.

  Dirt

  You may doubt me, but eating dirt is safer than eating many foods.

  I’m not saying that dirt is good for you. But some doctors are! Since ancient times, cultures from Africa to Greece to North America have eaten certain clays for medicinal reasons. How could this be? Well, your body needs substances like iron, manganese, and calcium, and these can be found in certain kinds of dirt. Further, the dirt found in termite mounds has kaolinite in it, which prevents diarrhea. In southern Africa, people with tummy troubles have dined on termite dirt with good success!

  So maybe parents shouldn’t freak out when Junior starts eating dirt. Because along with the dirt (which can’t be digested anyway) there are millions of bacteria. And some scientists are starting to think that these bacteria can help build a strong immune system.

  After all, there are already about ninety trillion microbes living inside you. And many of them are what help keep you healthy! Because of this, some doctors advise not worrying about eating a little dirt. They point out that farm kids play in the dirt a lot and hang around lots of animals. And compared to city kids, they are much less likely to get allergies and certain diseases!

  The Demon Cheese!

  Of course, the problem with dirt is that it tastes like, well, dirt, so let’s try talking about a more delicious food: cheese!

  Cheeses can range from being so soft they’re almost soupy to being so hard you could get knocked cold by one if a strange person attacked you with . . . a hard cheese. But all cheeses probably got their start thousands of years ago from an unknown Arab who was riding a horse or camel under the desert sun. As the Arab traveled, the pouch of milk he’d brought for his trip bounced along in the heat. When our rider stopped for a break, he was not amused to find his pouch full of curdled cheese. Dang it!

  But he was brave or desperate enough to try some, and the next thing you know, everyone was leaving out milk to curdle, harden, putrefy, and decay. Yep, that’s how you make cheese!

  Theoretically, you can make cheese from any mammal that produces thick milk. So there are cheeses made from cows, sheep, goats, and even reindeer. (I’ll bet whale cheese would work pretty well, too.) You may wonder why there aren’t any cheeses that come from omnivores or carnivores. Think about it: Who’s going to milk a grizzly bear?!

  As for human milk, it’s apparently too watery to make good cheese. That’s probably just as well. I don’t know if I could handle a slice of human cheese on my avocado sandwich. Plus, would eating human cheese be cannibalism? (I guess not, since babies drink the milk all the time . . . but still!)

  Besides, think of the crazy variety of cheeses already available. Even if you look at just the stinky cheeses, there are hundreds of different types. Of course, all cheeses are somewhat smelly; that’s what happens when you let milk go bad. But that’s not the only reason some cheese stinks. If you’ve ever seen Roquefort cheese, you know it has blue ribbons of color in it. These colored bits give the cheese a tangy taste. And those ribbons are actually mold—as in fungus.

  The world’s stinkiest cheese is apparently named Vieux Boulogne. This soft French cheese beat out more than a dozen others in a competition that featured nineteen human stink testers as well as an “electronic nose” programmed to analyze cheese aromas.

  How stinky is this cheese? Well, a cheese named Époisses de Bourgogne smells so bad, it’s been outlawed on all public transportation in France. And Vieux Boulogne beat it! But I think the contest was rigged, because it left out a cheese so deadly, it’s technically illegal everywhere. I refer to Casu Marzu, the demon cheese!

  Casu Marzu is made on the Italian island of Sardinia. Its name translates to “rotten cheese,” and it is also nicknamed “maggot cheese.” That’s because you can’t make it properly without flies laying eggs in it! The maggots supposedly enhance the cheese’s flavor by eating it and excreting cheese poop, which makes the Casu Marzu putrefy and ferment.

  When bringing a piece of Casu Marzu to your mouth, you’re supposed to cover it with one hand so that maggots don’t jump in your face. Yep, the cheese is alive! Too scared to do that? Then just cut a piece and tie if off in a plastic bag. When the bag stops squirming, the maggots are dead and it’s safe to eat. (Yes, this is how it’s done.) People who eat it say that Casu Marzu has a “gluey” texture, but between the squirming maggots and the burning sensation in your mouth and nostrils, you don’t mind it that much.

  Public health officials have banned Casu Marzu everywhere, but you know how that goes: when you outlaw a rotten cheese, then, uh, only outlaws will have rotten cheese. And if you can’t get your hands on some Casu Marzu, you can always travel to Germany to sample its Milbenkäse. This reddish-brown cheese swarms with cheese mites for three months to a year before it’s brought out to eat.

  Plants

  Plants just can’t compete with animals when it comes to being gross. Sure, you may THINK broccoli is gross, but try eating a tarantula, and then we’ll talk. So all I want to say about gross plants is this: there are people who pretend the rhubarb plant is good, even delicious.

  These people are very wrong.

  If you aren’t familiar with rhubarb, it’s a plant with thick stalks and broad leaves. But if you eat the leaves or roots of the rhubarb, you get poisoned by the oxalic acid in them. If you eat the stal
ks, you find that they’re really tough and acidy tasting. But if you cook the heck out of the stalks and put them in a pie with mounds of sugar, the rhubarb is barely edible (and still tart).

  Put it this way: the ancient Greeks called rhubarb the “vegetable of barbarians.” They were on to something!

  Elsewhere in the plant kingdom, there are certain seaweeds that are quite slimy. And there is also an algae that looks like wet, used toilet paper. It’s nickname is “rock snot.” Blech! And, of course, no discussion of disgusting plants is complete without mentioning the large and dangerously spiked Southeast Asian fruit called durian. This fruit smells bad. Really bad. Anthony Bourdain described it this way: “It smelled like you’d buried somebody holding a big wheel of Stilton [cheese] in his arms, then dug him up a few weeks later.”