For saliva-positive attitudes, there is no place like Greece. “Greeks spit on pretty much anything they want to protect from the evil eye or bless for good luck,” says Evi Numen. Numen is the exhibitions manager at the Mütter Museum,* a collection of medical curiosities amassed by Thomas Mütter and housed today at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. Though her job qualifies her to comment on most things bodily and disgusting, her salivary expertise derives from her upbringing. Numen is of Greek extraction. Greeks spit on babies. They spit on brides. They spit on themselves. Though no actual gob is launched. “Most people,” explains Numen, “say ‘ftou ftou ftou’ instead of actually spitting.”
The Greeks got it from the Roman Catholics, whose priests used to baptize with spittle. The priests got it from the Gospel of Mark—the bit where Jesus heals the blind by mixing dirt with his saliva and rubbing the mud on a man’s eyelids. “It’s an interesting passage,” former Catholic priest Tom Rastrelli told me, “because the writers of the gospels of Luke and Matthew, who used Mark as their source, redacted a line.” Mark had included a bit about a blind man opening his eyes and seeing what looked like trees walking around. In other words, the treatment was minimally effective. The miracle of Jesus bestowing rudimentary vision to the blind doesn’t have the same ring to it, so the line was cut.
THE DUTCH, BY tradition, are a dairy-farming people. Adults drink milk with dinner. A town will have a shop devoted entirely to cheese. The national dish of the Netherlands, sighs Silletti, is vla: custard. I have been staying in the home of food scientist René de Wijk, the world’s foremost expert on the science of semisolids like vla. Upon hearing this, Silletti immediately, as though it were a matter of medical urgency, invited me over for home-cooked Italian food.
Silletti is lactose-intolerant and, as concerns Dutch cuisine, just generally intolerant. “Everything is based on milk,” she says, arranging sundried tomatoes for a plate of antipasto.
Silletti’s home is a twenty-minute drive from Germany, where the supermarkets sell a decent range of Italian products. She regularly travels across the border to stock up. I don’t blame her. The supermarket near de Wijk’s house sells things like gorte pap—buttermilk barley porridge—and Smeer’m, a kind of spreadable cheese vileness. I’d go home with a cucumber and some peanuts because I wanted something real, something with crunch, something that didn’t sound like a gynecology exam. There was an entire aisle devoted to vla.
“The Dutch and their vla . . .” Silletti speaks it like a curse word. “For me it’s not food. You don’t need teeth or saliva!”
Oddly, the cluster of Wageningen-area universities and research facilities known as “Food Valley” is the home of the foremost expert on the physics of crunchy food, as well as a man who knows more about chewing than anyone else in the world. I am meeting them both tomorrow, at the Restaurant of the Future. This is a cafeteria at Wageningen University where hidden cameras allow researchers to gauge how, say, lighting affects purchasing behavior, or whether people are more likely to buy bread if you let them slice it themselves. Silletti says she won’t eat there.
“Because of the cameras?”
“Because of the food.”
* * *
* Except possibly Irwin Mandel. Mandel was the author of a hundred papers on saliva. A winner of the Salivary Research Award. The subject of a lush tribute in the Journal of Dental Research in 1997. The editor of the Journal of Dental Research in 1997. Mandel did not go so far as to write the tribute himself. That was done by B. J. Baum, P. C. Fox, and L. A. Tabak. Having three authors means no one man can be blamed for the sentence “Saliva was his vehicle and he went with the flow.”
* I can vouch for this. I once toured the refrigerator at Hill Top Research, where odor judges test the efficacy of deodorizing products like mouthwash and cat litter. The president at the time, Jack Wild, was looking for the malodor component of armpit smell, which I had asked to sample. He kept opening little jars, going, “Nope, that’s dirty feet, no, that’s fishy amines” (vaginal odor). I asked him which is the worst. “Incubated saliva,” he said without hesitating. “Both Thelma and I got dry heaves.” I don’t recall Thelma’s title. Whatever she did, she deserved a raise.
* Less high-tech than it sounds. Subjects leaned over and spat into the machine every two minutes. A slight improvement over the earliest collection technique, circa 1935: “The subject sits with head tilted forward, allowing the saliva to run to the front of the mouth . . . and drip out between parted lips.” A photo in Kerr’s monograph shows a nicely dressed woman, hair bobbed, hands palm down on the table in front of her, forehead resting in a support. An enamel basin is positioned just so, to catch the drippings.