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(The technical name for this internal smelling is retronasal olfaction. The more familiar sniffing of aromas through the external nostrils is called orthonasal olfaction.)
“All that stuff you read on wine bottles, in wine magazines, where they throw out a dozen descriptors? That’s not sensory evaluation. That’s marketing.”
Because it’s hard for people to gauge quality by flavor, they tend to gauge it by price. That’s a mistake. Langstaff has evaluated wine professionally for twenty years. In her opinion, the difference between a $500 bottle of wine and one that costs $30 is largely hype.
the simple reason that know-nothings are easier to train than know-it-alls.
“And you can’t ask the consumer,” says Langstaff. “You ask the consumer, ‘Why does it taste better?’ They say, ‘Because I like it better.’” The consumer’s flavor lexicon is tiny: yum and yuck.
The cooking process for the chicken in a microwavable entrée imparts a mild to nonexistent flavor. The flavor comes almost entirely from the sauce—by design. Says Moeller, “You want a common base that you can put two or three or more different sauces on and have a full product line.”
Outdoor cats tend to be either mousers or birders, not both.
Organs are so vitamin-rich, and edible plants so scarce, that the former are classified, for purposes of Arctic health education, both as “meat” and as “fruits and vegetables.” One serving from the Fruits and Vegetables Group in Nirlungayuk’s materials is “1/2 cup berries or greens, or 60 to 90 grams of organ meats.”
I pulled the rubbery chunk from Nirlungayuk’s knife. It was cold from the air outside and disconcertingly narwhal-colored. The taste of muktuk is hard to pin down. Mushrooms? Walnut? There was plenty of time to think about it, as it takes approximately as long to chew narwhal as it does to hunt them. I know you won’t believe me, because I didn’t believe Nartok, but muktuk is exquisite (and, again, healthy: as much vitamin A as in a carrot, plus a respectable amount of vitamin C).
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.
the painting, holds one end of a length of gum elastic tubing in St. Martin’s stomach;
The medical establishment of the day didn’t concern itself greatly with issues of informed consent and the rights of human subjects. It wouldn’t have occurred to people back then to condemn William Beaumont for exploiting a “porkeater” to advance scientific knowledge or his own career.
Ambassadors, chief justices, senators, and representatives, all were forced to take time away from their weighty lives to pen thank-you notes for a book on stomach secretions.
As is regularly evidenced by tens of thousands of gastric reflux sufferers—their acid production pharmaceutically curtailed—humans can get by with very little gastric acid. The acid’s main duty, in fact, is to kill bacteria—a fact that never occurred to Beaumont.
Higher-end detergents contain at least three digestive enzymes: amylase to break down starchy stains, protease for proteins, and lipase for greasy stains (not just edible fats but body oils like sebum). Laundry detergent is essentially a digestive tract in a box. Ditto dishwashing detergent: protease and lipase eat the food your dinner guests didn’t.
The best predictor of how long they chewed before swallowing wasn’t any particular attribute of the food. The best predictor was simply who’s chewing.
You get the sense oral processing experts are not, generally speaking, besieged by media inquiries.
“Immature swallowing coordination” is the reason 90 percent of food-related choking deaths befall children under the age of five. Also contributing: immature dentition. Kids grow incisors before they have molars; for a brief span of time they can bite off pieces of food but cannot chew them.
Hotdogs, grapes, and round candies take the top three slots in a list of killer foods published in the July 2008 issue of the International Journal of Pediatric Otorhinolaryngology, itself a calamitous mouthful.
candy called Lychee Mini Fruity Gels has killed enough times for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to have banned its import.
Sticky rice mochi, a traditional Japanese New Years food, kills about a dozen people every year—along with puffer fish and flaming cheese, the world’s riskiest menu items.
Crispness and crunch appeal to us because they signal freshness. Old, rotting, mushy produce can make you ill.
“People eat physics. You eat physical properties with a little bit of taste and aroma. And if the physics is not good, then you don’t eat it.”
If survival in the stomach were a simple matter of the size of the accommodations, any one of us could manage just fine. The forestomach of a killer whale, a far smaller creature, has been measured, unstretched, at five feet by seven feet—about as big as a room in a Tokyo capsule hotel, with a similar dearth of amenities.
As so often is the case with apocryphal tales like this, finding someone who knows someone who’s seen it is easy. Less easy is tracking down an actual eyewitness.
A study in the journal Obesity Surgery reported no significant differences in the size of the stomachs of morbidly obese people as compared with non-obese control subjects. It is hormones and metabolism, calories consumed and calories burned, that determine one’s weight, not holding capacity.
While the consumption record for many foods exceeds eight and even ten pounds, no one has ever been able to eat more than four pounds of fruit cake.
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Rodriguez doesn’t project the personality that his rap sheet suggests. He is friendly, engaged. He looks you in the eyes. Smiles easily. Has beautiful teeth. You’d be happy to sit next to him on a long flight. You would never take him for a prisoner were it not for his pants, which say “PRISONER” in 200-point type down the length of one thigh. That’s kind of a giveaway.
The medical term is paradoxical sphincter contraction. You’re pushing on the door at the same time you’re holding it shut. It’s a common cause of chronic constipation.* And one that all the fiber in the world won’t cure.
“Rowan and Gillette (1978) have described the case of a man who derived sexual pleasure from inflating his rectum with a bicycle tire pump.” (As I did not pursue the reference, I remain ignorant of this man’s fate and whether he exceeded the recommended PSI of the human rectum.)
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“Think of it,” said Robert Rosenbluth, a physician whose acquaintance I made at the start of this book. “No engineer could design something as multifunctional and fine-tuned as an anus. To call someone an asshole is really bragging him up.”
“The patient jerked upwards off the endoscopy table,” reads the case report, and the colonoscope was “completely ejected” (French for “launched from the rectum like a torpedo”).
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Gastric acid’s job is to kill microorganisms; without them there can be no hydrogen- or methane-producing fermentation. Even if a relative few bacteria survive in a stomach—and some species can, we now know—the chymified food is passed on to the small intestine too quickly for fermentation to make much headway.
The judges agreed on the following descriptors: “rotten eggs” for hydrogen sulfide, the gas with the strongest correlation to stink; “decomposing vegetables” for methanethiol; and “sweet” for dimethyl sulfide. Though lesser players contribute as well, it is for the most part these three notes, in subtly shifting combinations and percentages, that create the infinite olfactory variety of human flatus.
this scientifically proven (by Levitt) fact: “the flatus of women has a significantly greater concentration of hydrogen sulfide and was deemed to have a significantly worse odour by both judges.” (However, this is likely balanced out by the male’s “greater volume of gas per passage.”)
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Jones said that when he sat down and looked at the studies on dietary factors and colon cancer, the thing that stood out as a determinant of risk wasn’t how much fiber you ate, but how many calories. The fewer calories, the lower the risk. No easy profits there.
What Elvis’s autopsy did unambiguously reveal was a colon two to three times normal size.
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As regards bacteria in general, a radical shift in thinking is under way. For starters, there are way more of them than you. For every one cell of your body, there are nine (smaller) cells of bacteria. Khoruts takes issue with the them-versus-you mentality. “Bacteria represent a metabolically active organ in our bodies.” They are you. You are them. “It’s a philosophical question. Who owns who?”
The parasite Toxoplasma infects rats but needs to make its way into a cat’s gut to reproduce. The parasite’s strategy for achieving this goal is to alter the rat brain such that the rodent is now attracted to cat urine. Rat walks right up to cat, gets killed, eaten. If you saw the events unfold, Khoruts continued, you’d scratch your head and go, What is wrong with that rat? Then he smiled. “Do you think Republicans have different flora?”
is, of course, possible that I seem strange. You may be thinking, Wow, that Mary Roach has her head up her ass. To which I say: Only briefly, and with the utmost respect.
Typing colitis reliably brings “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” into my head. In my favorite case of mistaken lyrics, someone heard “The girl with kaleidoscope eyes” as “The girl with colitis goes by.”
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