Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal

by Mary Roach

As with other bodily imperatives, we’d rather not be watched. Feeding, and even more so its unsavory correlates, are as much taboos as mating and death.

For one thing, smell, unlike our other senses, isn’t consciously processed. The input goes straight to the emotion and memory centers.

The extent to which Americans project their own food qualms and biases onto their pets has lately veered off into the absurd.

“Catfish are basically swimming tongues,” says Rawson.

It seems odd to think of tasting without any perceptive experience, but you may be doing it right now. Humans have taste receptor cells in the gut, the voice box, the upper esophagus, but only the tongue’s receptors report to the brain.

Cats, unlike dogs and other omnivores, can’t taste sweetness.

“But no doubt somewhere in the world there’s a scientist trying to get a live python into an fMRI machine.”

Kleinsorge is German for “little trouble,” and it seems like a good name—

Because to a far greater extent than most of us realize, culture writes the menu. And culture doesn’t take kindly to substitutions.

So powerful are race- and status-based disgusts that explorers have starved to death rather than eat like the locals.