Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal

by Mary Roach

  Another strategy was to target kids. “The human infant enters the world without information about what is edible and what is not,” wrote psychologist Paul Rozin, who studied disgust for many years at the University of Pennsylvania. Until kids are around two, you can get them to try pretty much anything, and Rozin did. In one memorable study, he tallied the percentage of children aged sixteen to twenty-nine months who ate or tasted the following items presented to them on a plate: fish eggs (60 percent), dish soap (79 percent), cookies topped with ketchup (94 percent), a dead (sterilized) grasshopper (30 percent), and artfully coiled peanut butter scented with Limburger cheese and presented as “dog-doo” (55 percent). The lowest-ranked item, at 15 percent acceptance, was a human hair.*

  By the time children are ten years old, generally speaking, they’ve learned to eat like the people around them. Once food prejudices are set, it is no simple task to dissolve them. In a separate study, Rozin presented sixty-eight American college students with a grasshopper snack, this time a commercially prepared honey-covered variety sold in Japan. Only 12 percent were willing to try one.

  So the NRC tried to get elementary schools involved. Home economists were urged to approach teachers and lunch planners. “Let’s do more than say ‘How do you do’ to variety meats; let’s make friends with them!” chirps Jessie Alice Cline in the February 1943 Practical Home Economics. The War Food Administration pulled together a Food Conservation Education brochure with suggested variety-meat essay themes (“My Adventures in Eating New Foods”). Perhaps sensing the futility of trying to get ten-year-olds to embrace brains and hearts, the administration focused mainly on not wasting food. One suggested student activity took the form of “a public display of wasted edible food actually found in the garbage dump,” which does more than say “How do you do” to a long night of parental phone calls.

  The other problem with classroom-based efforts to change eating habits was that children don’t decide what’s for dinner. Mead and her team soon realized they had to get to the person they called the “gatekeeper”—Mom. Nirlungayuk reached a similar conclusion. I tracked him down, seventeen years later, and asked him what the outcome of his country-foods campaign had been. “It didn’t really work,” he said, from his office in the Nunavut department of wildlife and environment. “Kids eat what parents make for them. That’s one thing I didn’t do is go to the parents.”

  Even that can flop. Mead’s colleague Kurt Lewin, as part of the NRC research, gave a series of lectures to homemakers on the nutritional benefits of organ meats, ending with a plea for patriotic cooperation.* Based on follow-up interviews, just 10 percent of the women who’d attended had gone home and prepared a new organ meat for the family. Discussion groups were more effective than lectures, but guilt worked best of all. “They said to the women, ‘A lot of people are making a lot of sacrifices in this war,’” says Brian Wansink, author of “Changing Eating Habits on the Home Front.” “‘You can do your part by trying organ meats.’ All of a sudden, it was like, ‘Well, I don’t want to be the only person not doing my part.’”

  Also effective: pledges. Though it now seems difficult to picture it, Wansink says government anthropologists had PTA members stand up and recite, “I will prepare organ meats at least ____ times in the coming two weeks.” “The act of making a public commitment,” said Wansink, “was powerful, powerful, powerful.” A little context here: The 1940s was the heyday of pledges and oaths.* In Boy Scout halls, homerooms, and Elks lodges, people were accustomed to signing on the dotted line or standing and reciting, one hand raised. Even the Clean Plate Club—dreamed up by a navy commander in 1942—had an oath: “I, ____, being a member in good standing . . . , hereby agree that I will finish all the food on my plate . . . and continue to do so until Uncle Sam has licked the Japs and Hitler”—like, presumably, a plate.

  To open people’s minds to a new food, you sometimes just have to get them to open their mouths. Research has shown that if people try something enough times, they’ll probably grow to like it. In a wartime survey conducted by a team of food-habits researchers, only 14 percent of the students at a women’s college said they liked evaporated milk. After serving it to the students sixteen times over the course of a month, the researchers asked again. Now 51 percent liked it. As Kurt Lewin put it, “People like what they eat, rather than eat what they like.”

  The phenomenon starts early. Breast milk and amniotic fluid carry the flavors of the mother’s foods, and studies consistently show that babies grow up to be more accepting of flavors they’ve sampled while in the womb and while breastfeeding. (Babies swallow several ounces of amniotic fluid a day.) Julie Mennella and Gary Beauchamp of the Monell Chemical Senses Center have done a great deal of work in this area, even recruiting sensory panelists to sniff* amniotic fluid (withdrawn during amniocentesis) and breast milk from women who had and those who hadn’t swallowed a garlic oil capsule. Panelists agreed: the garlic-eaters’ samples smelled like garlic. (The babies didn’t appear to mind. On the contrary, the Monell team wrote, “Infants . . . sucked more when the milk smelled like garlic.”)

  As a food marketing consultant, Brian Wansink was involved in efforts to increase global consumption of soy products. Whether one succeeds at such an undertaking, he found, depends a great deal on the culture whose diet you seek to change. Family-oriented countries where eating and cooking are firmly bound by tradition—Wansink gives the examples of China, Colombia, Japan, and India—are harder to infiltrate. Cultures like the United States and Russia, where there’s less cultural pressure to follow tradition and more emphasis on the individual, are a better bet.

  Price matters too, though not always how you think it would. Saving money can be part of the problem. The well-known, long-standing cheapness of offal, Mead wrote, condemned it to the wordy category “edible for human beings but not by own kind of human being.” Eating organs, in 1943, could degrade one’s social standing. Americans preferred bland preparations of muscle meat partly because for as long as they could recall, that’s what the upper class ate.

  So powerful are race- and status-based disgusts that explorers have starved to death rather than eat like the locals. British polar exploration suffered heavily for its mealtime snobbery. “The British believed that Eskimo food . . . was beneath a British sailor and certainly unthinkable for a British officer,” wrote Robert Feeney in Polar Journeys: The Role of Food and Nutrition in Early Exploration. Members of the 1860 Burke and Wills expedition to cross Australia fell prey to scurvy or starved in part because they refused to eat what the indigenous Australians ate. Bugong-moth abdomen and witchetty grub may sound revolting, but they have as much scurvy-battling vitamin C as the same size serving of cooked spinach, with the additional benefits of potassium, calcium, and zinc.

  Of all the so-called variety meats, none presents a steeper challenge to the food persuader than the reproductive organs. Good luck to Deanna Pucciarelli, the woman who seeks to introduce mainstream America to the culinary joys of pig balls. “I am indeed working on a project on pork testicles,” said Pucciarelli, director of the Hospitality and Food Management Program at—fill my heart with joy!—Ball State University. Because she was bound by a confidentiality agreement, Pucciarelli could not tell me who would be serving them or why or what form they would take. Setting aside alleged fertility enhancers and novelty dare items (for example, “Rocky Mountain oysters”), the reproductive equipment seem to have managed to stay off dinner plates worldwide. Neither I nor Janet Riley, spokesperson for the American Meat Institute, could come up with a contemporary culture that regularly partakes of ovaries, uterus, penis, or vagina simply as something good to eat.

  Historically, there was ancient Rome. Bruce Kraig, president of the Culinary Historians of Chicago, passed along a recipe from Apicius, for sow uterus sausage. For a cookbook, Apicius has a markedly gladiatorial style. “Remove the entrails by the throat before the carcass hardens immediately after killing,” begins one recipe. Where a modern reci
pe might direct one to “salt to taste,” the uterus recipe says to “add cooked brains, as much as is needed.” Sleeter Bull,* the author of the 1951 book Meat for the Table, claims the ancient Greeks had a taste for udders. Very specifically, “the udders of a sow just after she had farrowed but before she had suckled her pigs.” That is either the cruelest culinary practice in history or so much Sleeter bull.

  I would wager that if you look hard enough, you will find a welcoming mouth for any safe source of nourishment, no matter how unpleasant it may strike you. “If we consider the wide range of foods eaten by all human groups on earth, one must . . . question whether any edible material that provides nourishment with no ill effects can be considered inherently disgusting,” writes the food scientist Anthony Blake. “If presented at a sufficiently early age with positive reinforcement from the childcarer, it would become an accepted part of the diet.” As an example, Blake mentions a Sudanese condiment made from fermented cow urine and used as a flavor enhancer “very much in the way soy sauce is used in other parts of the world.”

  The comparison was especially apt in the summer of 2005, when a small-scale Chinese operation was caught using human hair instead of soy to make cheap ersatz soy sauce. Our hair is as much as 14 percent L-cysteine, an amino acid commonly used to make meat flavorings and to elasticize dough in commercial baking. How commonly? Enough to merit debate among scholars of Jewish dietary law, or kashrut. “Human hair, while not particularly appetizing, is Kosher,” states Rabbi Zushe Blech, the author of Kosher Food Production, on Kashrut.com “There is no ‘guck’ factor,” Blech maintained, in an e-mail. Dissolving hair in hydrochloric acid, which creates the L-cysteine, renders it unrecognizable and sterile. The rabbis’ primary concern had not to do with hygiene but with idol worship. “It seems that women would grow a full head of hair and then shave it off and offer it to the idol,” wrote Blech. Shrine attendants in India have been known to surreptitiously collect the hair and sell it to wigmakers, and some in kashrut circles worried they might also be selling it to L-cysteine* producers. This proved not to be the case. “The hair used in the process comes exclusively from local barber shops,” Blech assures us. Phew.

  • • •

  THE MOST EFFECTIVE agent of dietary change is the adulated eater—the king who embraces whelks, the revolutionary hero with a passion for skewered hearts. “Normally disgusting substances or objects that are associated with admired . . . persons cease to be disgusting and may become pleasant,” writes Paul Rozin. For organ meats today, that person has been taking the form of celebrity chefs at high-profile eateries, such as Los Angeles’s Animal and London’s St. John, and on Food Network programs. On the Iron Chef episode “Battle Offal,” judges swooned over raw heart tartar, lamb’s liver truffles, tripe, sweetbreads, and gizzard. If things go as they usually go, hearts and sweetbreads might start to show up on home dinner tables in five or ten years.

  Time and again, AFB’s Pat Moeller has watched the progression with ethnic cuisines: from upscale restaurant to local eatery to dinner table to supermarket freezer section. “It starts as an appetizer typically. That’s low risk. Then it migrates to an entrée dish. Then it becomes a food that you can buy and take home and fix for your family.”

  With organ meats, where the prep may include, say, “removal of membrane,” the last phase will be slow-going. Unlike filets and stewing meats, organs look like what they are: body parts. That’s another reason we resist them. “Organs,” says Rozin, “remind us of what we have in common with animals.” In the same way a corpse spawns thoughts of mortality, tongues and tripe send an unwelcome message: you too are an organism, a chewing, digesting sack of guts.

  To eat liver, knowing that you, too, have a liver, brushes up against the cannibalism taboo. The closer we are to a species, emotionally or phylogenetically, the more potent our horror at the prospect of tucking in, the more butchery feels like murder. Pets and primates, wrote Mead, come under the category “unthinkable to eat.” The same cultures that eat monkey meat have traditionally drawn the line at apes.

  The Inuit, at the time I visited Igloolik, had no tradition of keeping animals as companions. A sled dog was more or less a piece of equipment. When I told Makabe Nartok that I had a cat, he asked, “What do you use it for?” In America, pets are family, never fare. That feeling held fast even during the years of World War II rationing, when horse or rabbit—delicacies right over the pond in France—might, you’d think, have seemed preferable to organs. In the 1943 opinion piece “Jackrabbit Should Be Used to Ease Meat Shortage,” Kansas City scientist B. Ashton Keith bemoans the “wasted meat resource” of jackrabbit carcasses that were being left for coyotes and crows after being killed by ranchers in “great drives that slaughter thousands.” (Most of these seemingly collected by Keith’s mother: “Some of the pleasantest recollections of my boyhood are of fried jackrabbit, baked jackrabbit, jackrabbit stew, and jackrabbit pie.”)

  SELF-MADE “NUTRITIONAL ECONOMIST” Horace Fletcher espoused a singular approach to getting Americans through a wartime meat shortage without resorting to rationing, or jackrabbits. What Fletcher proposed was a simple if burdensome adjustment to the human machinery.

  * * *

  * The Inuit Games. Most are indoor competitions originally designed to fit in igloos. Example: the Ear Lift: “On a signal, the competitor walks forward lifting the weight off the floor and carrying it with his ear for as far a distance as his ear will allow.” For the Mouth Pull, opponents stand side by side, shoulders touching and arms around each other’s necks as if they were dearest friends. Each grabs the outside corner of his opponent’s mouth with his middle finger and attempts to pull him over a line drawn in the snow between them. As so often is the case in life, “strongest mouth wins.”

  * Among themselves, meat professionals speak a jolly slang. “Plucks” are thoracic viscera: heart, lungs, trachea. Spleens are “melts,” rumens are “paunch,” and unborn calves are “slunks.” I once saw a cardboard box outside a New York meat district warehouse with a crude sign taped to it: FLAPS AND TRIANGLES.

  * The children were wise to be wary. Compulsive hair-eaters wind up with trichobezoars—human hairballs. The biggest ones extend from stomach into intestine and look like otters or big hairy turds and require removal by stunned surgeons who run for their cameras and publish the pictures in medical journal articles about “Rapunzel syndrome.” Bonus points for reading this footnote on April 27, National Hairball Awareness Day.

  * Meat and patriotism do not fit naturally together, and sloganeering proved a challenge. The motto “Food Fights for Freedom” would seem to inspire cafeteria mayhem more than personal sacrifice.

  * Pledge madness peaked in 1942. The June issue of Practical Home Economics reprinted a twenty-item Alhambra, California, Student Council antiwaste pledge that included a promise to “drive carefully to conserve rubber” and another to “get to class on time to save paper on tardy slips.” Perhaps more dire than the shortages in metal, meat, paper, and rubber was the “boy shortage” mentioned in an advice column on the same page. “Unless you do something about it, this means empty hours galore!” Luckily, the magazine had some suggestions. An out-of-fashion bouclé suit could be “unraveled, washed, tinted and reknitted” to make baby clothes. Still bored? “Take two worn rayon dresses and combine them to make one Sunday-best that looks brand new”—and fits like a dream if you are a giant insect or person with four arms.

  * They are to be excused for not tasting it too. Amniotic fluid contains fetal urine (from swallowed amniotic fluid) and occasionally meconium: baby’s first feces, composed of mucus, bile, epithelial cells, shed fetal hair, and other amniotic detritus. The Wikipedia entry helpfully contrasts the tarry, olive-brown smear of meconium—photographed in a tiny disposable diaper—with the similarly posed yellowish excretion of a breast-fed newborn, both with an option for viewing in the magnified resolution of 1,280 × 528 pixels.

  * Bull was chief of the University of Illinois
Meats Division and founding patron of the Sleeter Bull Undergraduate Meats Award. Along with meat scholarship, Bull supported and served as grand registrar of the Alpha Gamma Rho fraternity, where they knew a thing or two about undergraduate meats.

  * The other common source of L-cysteine is feathers. Blech has a theory that this might explain the medicinal value of chicken soup, a recipe for which can be found in the Gemorah (shabbos 145b) portion of the Talmud. L-cysteine, he says, is similar to the mucus-thinning drug acetylcysteine. And it is found, albeit in lesser amounts, in birds’ skin. “Chicken soup and its L-cysteine,” Blech said merrily, may indeed be “just what the doctor ordered.”

  4

  The Longest Meal

  CAN THOROUGH CHEWING LOWER THE NATIONAL DEBT?

  THE HORACE FLETCHER papers reside in a single cardboard box of a size that would hold a lightweight cardigan. The self-dubbed economic nutritionist did not attend Harvard,* but it is Harvard that came to own his letters, now stored in some dim recess of the Houghton Library. It was a spring day in May when I visited them. Outside the open windows, a run-through of commencement was under way, speeches being delivered before a plain of empty chairs. I recall feeling relieved by the compactness of the collection, for it appeared it could be gone through in a couple of hours, leaving time to enjoy the warm, chlorophyll-brightened Cambridge afternoon.