Mary Roach - Gulp

Probably more. The Handbook of Fruit and Vegetable Flavors includes a four-page table of aroma compounds identified in fresh pineapple: 716 chemicals in all.

Moeller, who has tasted the naked Cheeto, likens it to a piece of unsweetened puffed corn cereal.

Or that’s what we think we like. In reality, the average person eats no more than about thirty foods on a regular basis. “It’s very restricted,” says Adam Drewnowski, director of the University of Washington Center for Obesity Research, who did the tallying. Most people ran through their entire repertoire in four days.

This explains the perplexing odor of swamp water on certain floors of the Monell Chemical Senses Center during the 1980s. The basement was a big catfish pond.

Not a Campbell’s product.

Gone are the colored pet-food pieces of the early 1990s. “Because when it comes back up, then you have green and red dye all over your carpet,” says Rawson. “That was a huge duh .”

My brother works in market research. One time after he visited I found a thick report in the trash detailing consumers’ feelings about pre-moistened towelettes. It contained the term “wiping events.”

The Holy Grail is a pet food that not only smells unobjectionable, but also makes the pets’ feces smell unobjectionable. It’s a challenge because most things you could add to do that will get broken down in digestion and rendered ineffectual. Activated charcoal is problematic because it binds up not just smelly compounds, but nutrients too. Hill’s Pet Nutrition experimented with adding ginger. It worked well enough for a patent to have been granted, which must have been some consolation to the nine human panelists tasked with “detecting differences in intensity of the stool odor by sniffing the odor through a port.”

As is jalapeño—though according to psychologist Paul Rozin, Mexican dogs, unlike American dogs, enjoy a little heat. Rozin’s work suggests animals have cultural food preferences too. Rozin was not the first academic to feed ethnic cuisine to research animals. In “The Effect of a Native Mexican Diet on Learning and Reasoning in White Rats,” subjects were served chili con carne, boiled pinto beans, and black coffee. Their scores at maze-solving remained high, possibly because of an added impetus to find their way to a bathroom. In 1926, the Indian Research Fund Association compared rats who lived on chapatis and vegetables with rats fed a Western diet of tinned meat, white bread, jam, and tea. So repellent was the Western fare that the latter group preferred to eat their cage mates, three of them so completely that “little or nothing remained for post-mortem examination.”

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.”

He did, however, leave the residue of his estate to Harvard, part of which went toward funding the Horace Fletcher Prize. This was to be awarded each year for “the best thesis on the subject ‘Special Uses of Circumvallate Papilli and the Saliva of the Mouth in Regulating Physiological Economy in Nutrition.’” Harvard’s Prize Office has no record of anyone applying for, much less winning, the prize.

The two parted ways over feces. Kellogg’s healthful ideal was four loose logs a day; Fletcher’s was a few dry balls once a week. It got personal. “His tongue was heavily coated and his breath was highly malodorous,” sniped Kellogg.

I managed to track down only one stanza. It was enough. “I choose to chew / because I wish to do / the sort of thing that Nature had in view / Before bad cooks invented sav’ry stew / When the only way to eat was to chew, chew, chew.”