|
58ccc28
|
It starts as an appetizer typically. That's low risk. Then it migrates to an entree dish. Then it becomes a food that you can buy and take home and fix for your family.
|
|
|
Mary Roach |
|
a1b45a3
|
Unlike filets and stewing meats, organs look like what they are: body parts. That's another reason we resist them. "Organs," says Rozin, "remind us of what we have in common with animals." In the same way a corpse spawns thoughts of mortality, tongues and tripe send an unwelcome message: you too are an organism, a chewing, digesting sack of guts."
|
|
|
Mary Roach |
|
471f320
|
To eat liver, knowing that you, too, have a liver, brushes up against the cannibalism taboo. The closer we are to a species, emotionally or phylogenetically, the more potent our horror at the prospect of tucking in, the more butchery feels like murder. Pets and primates, wrote Mead, come under the category "unthinkable to eat." The same cultures that eat monkey meat have traditionally drawn the line at apes."
|
|
|
Mary Roach |
|
89046a4
|
People who claim lactose intolerance tend to also voice a belief that they're gluten-intolerant. Usually with no evidence of either.
|
|
|
Mary Roach |
|
849f557
|
The Inuit, at the time I visited Igloolik, had no tradition of keeping animals as companions. A sled dog was more or less a piece of equipment. When I told Makabe Nartok that I had a cat, he asked, "What do you use it for?" In America, pets are family, never fare."
|
|
|
Mary Roach |
|
5b6de9f
|
Hydrogen sulfide is as lethal, molecule for molecule, as cyanide. This may explain why humans evolved such exquisite sensitivity to its smell.
|
|
|
Mary Roach |
|
2983e16
|
panel applicants at the initial screening were asked not only to describe the cat foods but also to rate them according to how much they liked them. (The average rating, I am gobsmacked to report, fell between "like mildly" and "neither like nor dislike.")"
|
|
|
Mary Roach |
|
194d3ce
|
Hydrogen sulfide is so swiftly lethal that farm- and workplace-safety organizations urge anyone who enters a manure pit or attempts to clear a blocked sewage pipe to wear a self-contained breathing apparatus.
|
|
|
Mary Roach |
|
d1c4121
|
Thanks to this unusual data set, we now know that humans prefer cat food with a tuna or herbal flavor over cat food with the flavor descriptors "rancid," "offaly," "cereal," or "burnt." But humans, as we are about to see, are not cats."
|
|
|
Mary Roach |
|
dcfe418
|
And in the case of fecal transplants, there's no drug or medical device involved, and thus no pharmaceutical company or device maker with diverticula deep enough to fund the multiple rounds of controlled clinical trials. If anything, drug companies might be inclined to fight the procedure's approval. Pharmaceutical companies make money by treating diseases, not by curing them. "There's billions of dollars at stake," says Khoruts. "I told Ka..
|
|
|
Mary Roach |
|
5389f9c
|
Denis Burkitt, fueled a decade-long fiber craze. Americans were forcing down unprecedented amounts of bran muffins, oatmeal, and high-fiber breakfast cereals. Whorton cited a 1984 survey that found a third of Americans eating more fiber to stay healthy. You don't hear so much about fiber these days.
|
|
|
Mary Roach |
|
e63aeea
|
AFB makes flavor coatings for dry pet foods. To test the coatings, they first need to make small batches of plain kibble and add the coatings. The flavored kibbles are then presented to consumer panels for feedback. The panelists--Spanky, Thomas, Skipper, Porkchop, Rover, Elvis, Sandi, Bela, Yankee, Fergie, Murphy, Limburger, and some three hundred other dogs and cats--reside at AFB's Palatability Assessment Resource Center (PARC), about an..
|
|
|
Mary Roach |
|
6e040e5
|
AFB Vice President Pat Moeller, myself, and a few other staff members are seated around an oval conference table. Moeller is middle-aged, likable, and plain-spoken. He has a small mouth with naturally deep red lips and a pronounced Cupid's bow, but it would be inaccurate to say he has a feminine appearance. Moeller once consulted for NASA, and he has that look. The fundamental challenge of the pet-food professional, Moeller is saying, is to..
|
|
|
Mary Roach |
|
b87b6b4
|
This is especially doable with dog food, as dogs rely more on smell than taste in making choices about what to eat and how vigorously. (Pat Moeller estimates that for dogs, the ratio for how much aroma matters to how much taste matters is 70/30. For cats, the ratio is more like 50/50.) The takeaway lesson is that if the palatant smells appealing, the dog will dive in with instant and obvious zeal, and the owner will assume the food is a hit..
|
|
|
Mary Roach |
|
c7ad626
|
The flesh gives no resistance and yields no blood.
|
|
|
Mary Roach |
|
2c50ef4
|
Medicare reimbursement code for maggots: CPT 99070.
|
|
|
Mary Roach |
|
a035f44
|
With charm comes charm's sidekick, dilapidation.
|
|
|
Mary Roach |
|
22793a9
|
frustration metastasizes to anger. Anger wants an outlet and a victim.
|
|
|
Mary Roach |
|
8d96317
|
if you slip a rat's face and hide, Hannibal Lecter-style, over the snout of a non-favored prey item, a python will try to swallow it. (University of Alabama snake digestion expert Stephen Secor did this some years back to reenact a scene for National Geographic television. "Worked like a charm," he told me. "I can get a python to eat a beer bottle if I put a rat head on it.") For"
|
|
|
Mary Roach |
|
d3ab908
|
Funny thing happened on the way to the moon: not much," wrote Apollo 17 astronaut Gene Cernan. "Should have brought some crossword puzzles."
|
|
|
Mary Roach |
|
b2b1903
|
What sets a professional nose apart from an everyday nose is not so much its sensitivity to the many aromas in a food or drink, but the ability to tease them apart and identify them.
|
|
|
Mary Roach |
|
3e20880
|
It's one thing to get enough evidence to convince yourself, but it's a whole other matter to produce a demonstration that would be acceptable to a community of scientists,
|
|
|
Mary Roach |
|
7b7a772
|
Animals have evolved to survive," Rawson says. They like what's best for them. People blanch to see "fish meal" or "meat meal" on a pet-food ingredient panel, but meal--which variously includes organs, heads, skin, and bones--most closely resembles the diet of dogs and cats in the wild."
|
|
|
Mary Roach |
|
dbbee6c
|
Animals' taste systems are specialized for the niche they occupy in the environment. "That's driven their sensory systems down a certain path," Rawson says. This includes the animal known as us."
|
|
|
Mary Roach |
|
ea2904b
|
Here is what William Beaumont had to say about saliva: "Its legitimate and only use, in my opinion, is to lubricate the food to facilitate the passage of the bolus through the [esophagus]." Beaumont was right about some things, but he was dead wrong about spit."
|
|
|
Mary Roach |
|
12c8af7
|
Rawson has an idea of what it is like to eat without perceiving tastes, because she has talked to cancer patients whose taste receptors have been destroyed by radiation treatments. The situation is well beyond unpleasant. "Your body is saying, 'It's not food, it's cardboard,' and it won't let you swallow. No matter how much you tell your brain that you need to eat to survive, you'll gag. These people can actually die of starvation."
|
|
|
Mary Roach |
|
1f2ae5f
|
As hunters and foragers of the dry savannah, our earliest forebears evolved a taste for important but scarce nutrients: salt and high-energy fats and sugars.
|
|
|
Mary Roach |
|
fee48cd
|
This is a book about notable achievements made while dead.
|
|
|
Mary Roach |
|
08675f2
|
technologists sometimes exploit the synergy between the two. By adding strawberry or vanilla--aromas we associate with sweetness--it's possible to fool people into thinking a food is sweeter than it really is. Though sneaky, this is not necessarily bad, because it means the product can contain less added sugar. Which
|
|
|
Mary Roach |
|
eb73bcc
|
What can be done for these men? A lot. The art of phalloplasty--crafting a working penis from other parts of a patient's body--has come a long way (thanks in no small part to the transgender community).
|
|
|
Mary Roach |
|
a3a4d2a
|
dogs rely more on smell than taste in making choices about what to eat and how vigorously. (Pat Moeller estimates that for dogs, the ratio for how much aroma matters to how much taste matters is 70/30. For cats, the ratio is more like 50/50.)
|
|
|
Mary Roach |
|
3ea0557
|
Could those sound waves shake apart your organs? NASA did testing on this back in the sixties, to be sure, as one infrasound expert told me, "that they didn't deliver jam to the moon."
|
|
|
Mary Roach |
|
f3a238c
|
They think of it as lubricating, and that's it!" She went back to her hotel room and called her boyfriend in tears."
|
|
|
Mary Roach |
|
4f4ea14
|
As a feature of the common man's funeral, the open casket is a relatively recent development: around 150 years. According to Mack, it serves several purposes, aside from providing what undertakers call "the memory picture." It reassures the family that, one, their loved one is unequivocally dead and not about to be buried alive, and, two, that the body in the casket is indeed their loved one, and not the stiff from the container beside his...
|
|
|
Mary Roach |
|
f395be6
|
Analogies drawn from the inspection of hen's eggs foundered on the objection that man was not a chicken.
|
|
|
Mary Roach |
|
d9e3891
|
The only conclusion I feel sure of at this point," he mused, "is that women are too complicated."
|
|
|
Mary Roach |
|
e9205cc
|
According to the Kind & Knox Web site, other products made with cow-bone-and-pigskin-based gelatin include marshmallows, nougat-type candy bar fillings, liquorice, Gummi Bears, caramels, sports drinks, butter, ice cream, vitamin gel caps, suppositories, and that distasteful whitish peel on the outside of salamis.
|
|
|
Mary Roach |
|
3cd464c
|
I came across a NATO symposium on Human Performance Optimization that included a roundup of medical technologies that might be repurposed to optimize warfighters. In among the prosthetic limbs "to provide superhuman strength" and the infrared and ultraviolet vision-bestowing eye implants was this: corpus callosotomy to "allow unihemispheric sleep and continuous alertness."
|
|
|
Mary Roach |
|
6d69d8d
|
Borman much later admitted that he was, as Cernan wrote in his memoir, "sick as a dog* all the way to the moon."
|
|
|
Mary Roach |
|
7e60fcf
|
The question "Which beer do you want, Mary?" went down at the end. When she puts her nose to a glass, though, something switches on. She sits straighter and her words come out faster, lit by interest and focus. "It smells like a campfire to me also. Smokey, like wood, charred wood. Like a cedar chest, like a cigar, tobacco, dark things, smoking jackets." She sips from the glass. "Now I'm getting the chocolate in the mouth. Caramel, cocoa ni..
|
|
|
Mary Roach |
|
53307f2
|
Anyone who hunts, the pair told me, eats organs. Though the Inuit (in Canada, the term is preferred over Eskimo) gave up their nomadic existence in the 1950s, most adult men still supplemented the family diet with hunted game, partly to save money. In 1993, when I visited, a small can of Spork, the local Spam, cost $2.69. Produce arrives by plane. A watermelon might set you back $25. Cucumbers were so expensive that the local sex educator d..
|
|
|
Mary Roach |
|
406a6b9
|
And decay is highly dependent on environmental and situational factors. What's the weather been like? Was the body buried? In what? Seeking better understanding of the effects of these factors, the University of Tennessee (UT) Anthropological Research Facility, as it is blandly and vaguely called, has buried bodies in shallow graves, encased them in concrete, left them in car trunks and manmade ponds, and wrapped them in plastic bags. Prett..
|
|
|
Mary Roach |
|
ccb350e
|
eye cap is a simple ten-cent piece of plastic. It is slightly larger than a contact lens, less flexible, and considerably less comfortable. The plastic is repeatedly lanced through, so that small, sharp spurs stick up from its surface. The spurs work on the same principle as those steel spikes that threaten Severe Tire Damage on behalf of rental car companies: The eyelid will come down over an eye cap, but, once closed, will not easily open..
|
|
|
Mary Roach |
|
5514ca1
|
I'm short, I'm thin, I'm not rich. I would say my career choice is in fourth place in limiting my effectiveness as a single adult." (It's possible that it helped. Within a year, he would be married.)"
|
|
|
Mary Roach |