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ELVIS PRESLEY'S COLON is not on display in a glass case, but you can get a good sense of what it looked like by reading the autopsy section of The Death of Elvis. "As Florendo cut, he found that this megacolon was jam-packed from the base of the descending colon all the way up and halfway across the transverse colon. . . . The impaction had the consistency of clay and seemed to defy Florendo's efforts with the scissors to cut it out." Nicho..
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Mary Roach |
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14a3e0f
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Interpreting animals' eating behaviors is tricky. By way of example, one of the highest compliments a dog can pay its food is to vomit. When a "gulper," to use Pat Moeller's terminology, is excited by the aroma of a food, it will wolf down too much too fast. The stomach overfills, and the meal is reflexively sent back up to avoid any chance of a rupture. "No consumer likes that, but it's the best indication that the dog just loved it." Fort..
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Mary Roach |
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8c1bba2
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But peanuts are hardly representative of the average food. Everyone knows--via "visual observation of stool samples," to use the New England Journal of Medicine's way of saying "a glance before flushing"--that chunks of peanuts make their way through the alimentary canal undigested. Nuts are known for this. Peanuts (and corn kernels) are so uniquely and reliably hard to break down that they are used as "marker foods" in do-it-yourself tests..
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Mary Roach |
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47b5e23
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The difference between dog and cat is immediately obvious. While a dog almost (and occasionally literally) inhales its food the moment it's set down, cats are more cautious. A cat wants to taste a little first. McCarthy directs my gaze to the kibble that has no palatant coating. "See how they feel it in their mouth and then drop it?"
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Mary Roach |
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449bc89
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The terrier mix is named Alabama. His tail thumps a beat on the side of the crate. "Alabama is a gobbler real bad," Theresa says. In making their reports, the AFB techs must take into account the animals' individual mealtime quirks. There are gulpers, circlers, tippers, snooters. If you weren't acquainted with Alabama's neighbor Elvis, for example, you'd think he was blase about both foods just now set before him. Theresa gives a running co..
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Mary Roach |
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261714d
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Stocks passed my e-mail along to Model Gut senior scientist Richard Faulks. Faulks was dismissive not only of extreme chewing, but also of the related fad for blenderizing to increase the accessibility of nutrients. It's true saliva carries an enzyme that breaks down starch, but the pancreas makes this enzyme too. So any digestive slack caused by hasty chewing would be taken up in the small intestine. The human digestive tract has evolved t..
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Mary Roach |
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feec903
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Faulks was dismissive not only of extreme chewing, but also of the related fad for blenderizing to increase the accessibility of nutrients.
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Mary Roach |
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d902848
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PARC techs also try to keep a bead on doggy interactions in the yards. "We need to know," says McCarthy. "'Are you down because you don't like the food or because Pipes stole your bone earlier?'" Theresa volunteers that a dog named Rover has lately had a stomach upset, and Porkchop likes to eat the vomit. "So that's cutting into Porkchop's appetite." And probably yours."
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Mary Roach |
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3bf5e01
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One thing to be said in favor of thorough chewing is that it slows an eater down. This is helpful if that particular eater is trying to shed some weight. By the time his brain registers that his stomach is full, the plodding thirty-two-chews-per-bite eater will have packed in far less food than the five-chews-per-bite wolfer. But there's thorough and there's Fletcher. Chewing each bite, say, a hundred times, Faulks said, could have the oppo..
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Mary Roach |
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d5e8dfb
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ask him about Fletcherizing. "You're going to spend all day just having breakfast. You will lose your job!"
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Mary Roach |
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80eaa4c
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Alexis St. Martin. In the early 1800s, St. Martin worked as a trapper for the American Fur Company in what is now Michigan. At age eighteen, he was accidently shot in the side. The wound healed as an open fistulated passage, the hole in his stomach fusing with the overlying holes in the muscles and skin. St. Martin's surgeon, William Beaumont, recognized the value of the unusual aperture as a literal window into the actions of the human sto..
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Mary Roach |
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736d266
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Experiment 1 began at noon on August 1, 1825. "I introduced through the perforation, into the stomach, the following articles of diet, suspended by a silk string: . . . a piece of high seasoned a la mode beef; a piece of raw salted fat pork; a piece of raw salted lean beef; . . . a piece of stale bread; and a bunch of raw sliced cabbage; . . . the lad continuing his usual employment about the house." On the very first day of his research ca..
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Mary Roach |
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d52eb2f
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The Salivette makes an unmistakable point: your parotid glands don't care what you chew. There is nothing remotely foodlike about superabsorbent cotton, yet the parotids gamely set to work. They are your faithful servants. Whatever you decide to eat, boss, I will help you get it down.
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Mary Roach |
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0174ebe
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For Arctic nomads, eating organs has, historically, been a matter of survival. Even in summer, vegetation is sparse. Little beyond moss and lichen grows abundantly on the tundra. 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 ..
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Mary Roach |
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5f95688
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Our hair is as much as 14 percent L-cysteine, an amino acid commonly used to make meat flavorings and to elasticize dough in commercial baking. How commonly? Enough to merit debate among scholars of Jewish dietary law, or kashrut. "Human hair, while not particularly appetizing, is Kosher,"
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Mary Roach |
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61adee1
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changes in the teaching of anatomy have nothing to do with cadaver shortages or public opinion about dissection; they have everything to do with time. Despite the immeasurable advances made in medicine over the past century, the material must be covered in the same number of years. Suffice it to say there's a lot less time for dissection than there was in Astley Cooper's day.
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Mary Roach |
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20381be
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As is jalapeno--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-solv..
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Mary Roach |
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1c89d9e
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Good luck to Deanna Pucciarelli, the woman who seeks to introduce mainstream America to the culinary joys of pig balls. "I am indeed working on a project on pork testicles," said Pucciarelli, director of the Hospitality and Food Management Program at--fill my heart with joy!--Ball State University."
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Mary Roach |
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cda5a4f
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Our final challenge is a ranking test: five olive oils of differing degrees of bitterness. This proves a challenge for me, as I would not have described any of them as bitter. All around me, people make sounds like ill-mannered soup-eaters, aerating the oils to free the aromatic gases. I'm doing a mnyeh-mnyeh-mnyeh Bugs Bunny thing with my tongue, but it's not helping. Well before the test period ends, I stop. I do something I've never done..
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Mary Roach |
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2f07327
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Taste is a sort of chemical touch. Taste cells are specialized skin cells. If you have hands for picking up foods and putting them into your mouth, it makes sense for taste cells to be on your tongue. But if, like flies, you don't, it may be more expedient to have them on your feet. "They land on something and go, 'Oooo, sugar!''' Rawson does her best impersonation of a housefly. "And the proboscis automatically comes out to suck the fluids..
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Mary Roach |
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fb43fb8
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Rawson has a colleague who studies crayfish and lobsters, which taste with their antennae. "I was always jealous of people who study lobsters. They examine the antennae, and then they have a lobster dinner."
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Mary Roach |
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fbecf9b
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The study animal of choice for taste researchers is the catfish,* simply because it has so many receptors. They are all over its skin. "Catfish are basically swimming tongues," says Rawson. It is a useful adaptation for a limbless creature that locates food by brushing up against it; many catfish species feed by scavenging debris on the bottom of rivers."
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Mary Roach |
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1189754
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Meaning "by way of the anus." "Per annum," with two n's, means "yearly." The correct answer to the question, "What is the birth rate per anum?" is zero (one hopes). The Internet provides many fine examples of the perils of confusing the two. The investment firm that offers "10% interest per anum" is likely to have about as many takers as the Nigerian screenwriter who describes himself as "capable of writing 6 movies per anum" or the Sri Lan..
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Mary Roach |
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6d1ed14
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No engineer could design something as multifunctional and fine-tuned as an anus. To call someone an asshole is really bragging him up.
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Mary Roach |
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f143430
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On human decay and what can be done about it
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Mary Roach |
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d543fa9
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What I am getting at is that there is a point at which efficiency crosses over into lunacy, and the savings in money or resources cease to be worthwhile
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Mary Roach |
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449be60
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The Soviet space agency did not traditionally give cosmonauts steak and eggs before launch; it gave them a one-liter enema.) Fahey,
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Mary Roach |
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a09d0ba
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But what if the soul -the residual energy/information that doesn't register on our electromagnetic energy detectors- doesn't go somewhere else, but just, you know, snuffs out? Ceases to exist? That has always been my own depressing, humdrum assumption regarding death. No can be, says Nahum. Standing in the way is the First Law of Thermodynamics: Energy is neither created nor destroyed. It has to go somewhere..."The question then becomes, Wh..
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soul
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Mary Roach |
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d7eb16f
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Marcel dropped a white plastic bag onto the table. It bounced slightly on landing. "Muktuk," Nirlungayuk said approvingly. It was a piece of narwhal skin, uncooked."
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Mary Roach |
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c7d74ee
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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, ..
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Mary Roach |
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841c2a2
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For a cookbook, Apicius has a markedly gladiatorial style. "Remove the entrails by the throat before the carcass hardens immediately after killing," begins one recipe."
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Mary Roach |
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39b65e0
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Sleeter Bull,* the author of the 1951 book Meat for the Table, claims the ancient Greeks had a taste for udders. Very specifically, "the udders of a sow just after she had farrowed but before she had suckled her pigs." That is either the cruelest culinary practice in history or so much Sleeter bull."
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Mary Roach |
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1d02533
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As an example, Blake mentions a Sudanese condiment made from fermented cow urine and used as a flavor enhancer "very much in the way soy sauce is used in other parts of the world."
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Mary Roach |
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258bc7f
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As one former anatomy instructor said to me, "No one's taking heads home in buckets anymore."
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Mary Roach |
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39f891d
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Our hair is as much as 14 percent L-cysteine, an amino acid commonly used to make meat flavorings and to elasticize dough in commercial baking. How commonly? Enough to merit debate among scholars of Jewish dietary law, or kashrut. "Human hair, while not particularly appetizing, is Kosher," states Rabbi Zushe Blech, the author of Kosher Food Production, on Kashrut.com "There is no 'guck' factor," Blech maintained, in an e-mail. Dissolving ha..
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Mary Roach |
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85831cd
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During weightlessness, many of the letters strayed from the boxes, indicating that pilots might experience difficulties maneuvering their planes and doing crossword puzzles during air battles. The following
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Mary Roach |
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8c2d88f
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But students weren't going to pay tuition to learn arm and leg anatomy;
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Mary Roach |
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992bfff
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All are wines Wagner himself enjoys. At least one is under $10 and two are over $50. "Over the past eighteen years, every time," he told me, "the least expensive wine averages the highest ranking, and the most expensive two finish at the bottom." In 2011, a Gallo cabernet scored the highest average rating, and a Chateau Gruaud Larose (which retails from between $60 and $70) took the bottom"
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Mary Roach |
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6764de7
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The pay worked out to about $1,000 a year--some five to ten times the earnings of the average unskilled laborer--with summers off.
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Mary Roach |
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3b13ab6
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Mortuary embalming is designed to keep a cadaver looking fresh and uncadaverous for the funeral service, but not much longer. (Anatomy departments amp up the process by using greater amounts and higher concentrations of formalin; these corpses may remain intact for years, though they take on a kind of pickled horror-movie appearance.)
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Mary Roach |
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f161c14
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I don't know the ultimate fate of a suppressed fart.
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poot
flatulence
gas
farting
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Mary Roach |
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a4a636e
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And that if you did tell them the details, they might change their minds and withdraw consent.
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Mary Roach |
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66b38cb
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The shot is an extreme close-up, making it impossible to tell, without already knowing, what kind of flesh it is. It could be Julia Child skinning poultry before a studio audience. The seminar
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Mary Roach |
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5001948
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A meteoroid is a bit of debris, usually planetary, hurtling through the solar system. If it's bigger than a boulder, than it's an asteroid. If any part of a meteroid makes it to Earth intact rather than burning up as it barrels through Earth's atmosphere, then it's a meteorite. A meteoroid's visible path through the atmosphere is a meteor. An astronaut struck by a meteoroid is a goner. A meteroid the size of a tomato seed can pierce a space..
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Mary Roach |