The taboos have worked in my favor. The alimentary recesses hide a lode of unusual stories, mostly unmined. Authors have profiled the brain, the heart, the eyes, the skin, the penis and the female geography, even the hair,* but never the gut. The pie hole and the feed chute are mine.
Like a bite of something yummy, you will begin at one end and make your way to the other. Though this is not a practical health book, your more pressing alimentary curiosities will be addressed. And some less pressing. Could thorough chewing lower the national debt? If saliva is full of bacteria, why do animals lick their wounds? Why don’t suicide bombers smuggle bombs in their rectums? Why don’t stomachs digest themselves? Why is crunchy food so appealing? Can constipation kill you? Did it kill Elvis?
You will occasionally not believe me, but my aim is not to disgust. I have tried, in my way, to exercise restraint. I am aware of the website www.poopreport.com, but I did not visit. When I stumbled on the paper “Fecal Odor of Sick Hedgehogs Mediates Olfactory Attraction of the Tick” in the references of another paper, I resisted the urge to order a copy. I don’t want you to say, “This is gross.” I want you to say, “I thought this would be gross, but it’s really interesting.” Okay, and maybe a little gross.
* * *
* Similar products exist to this day, under names like “Dual Sex Human Torso with Detachable Head” and “Deluxe 16-Part Human Torso,” adding an illicit serial-killer, sex-crime thrill to educational supply catalogues.
* In reality, guts are more stew than meat counter, a fact that went underappreciated for centuries. So great was the Victorian taste for order that displaced organs constituted a medical diagnosis. Doctors had been misled not by plastic models, but by cadavers and surgical patients—whose organs ride higher because the body is horizontal. The debut of X-rays, for which patients sit up and guts slosh downward, spawned a fad for surgery on “dropped organs”—hundreds of body parts needlessly hitched up and sewn in place.
* The Hair, by Charles Henri Leonard, published in 1879. It was from Leonard that I learned of a framed display of presidential hair, currently residing in the National Museum of American History and featuring snippets from the first fourteen presidents, including a coarse, yellow-gray, “somewhat peculiar” lock from John Quincy Adams. Leonard, himself moderately peculiar, calculated that “a single head of hair of average growth and luxuriousness in any audience of two hundred people will hold supported that entire audience” and, I would add, render an evening at the theater so much the more memorable.
1
Nose Job
TASTING HAS LITTLE TO DO WITH TASTE
THE SENSORY ANALYST rides a Harley. There are surely many things she enjoys about traveling by motorcycle, but the one Sue Langstaff mentions to me is the way the air, the great and odorous out-of-doors, is shoved into her nose. It’s a big, lasting passive sniff.* This is why dogs stick their heads out the car window. It’s not for the feeling of the wind in their hair. When you have a nose like a dog has, or Sue Langstaff, you take in the sights by smell. Here is California’s Highway 29 between Napa and St. Helena, through Langstaff’s nose: cut grass, diesel from the Wine Train locomotive, sulfur being sprayed on grapes, garlic from Bottega Ristorante, rotting vegetation from low tide on the Napa River, toasting oak from the Demptos cooperage, hydrogen sulfide from the Calistoga mineral baths, grilling meat and onions from Gott’s drive-in, alcohol evaporating off the open fermenters at Whitehall Lane Winery, dirt from a vineyard tiller, smoking meats at Mustards Grill, manure, hay.
Tasting—in the sense of “wine-tasting” and of what Sue Langstaff does when she evaluates a product—is mostly smelling. The exact verb would be flavoring, if that could be a verb in the same way tasting and smelling are. Flavor is a combination of taste (sensory input from the surface of the tongue) and smell, but mostly it’s the latter. Humans perceive five tastes—sweet, bitter, salty, sour, and umami (brothy)—and an almost infinite number of smells. Eighty to ninety percent of the sensory experience of eating is olfaction. Langstaff could throw away her tongue and still do a reasonable facsimile of her job.