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People pooh-pooh Bud. It's an extremely well-made beer. It's clean, it's refreshing. If you're mowing the lawn and you come in and you want something refreshing and thirst-quenching, you wouldn't drink this." She indicates the IPA. Of all the descriptors"
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Mary Roach |
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She warns me about equating complexity with quality. "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."
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Mary Roach |
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Taste--as in personal preference, discernment--is subjective. It's ephemeral, shaped by trends and fads. It's one part mouth and nose, two parts ego. Even flavors that professional evaluators agree are "defects" can come to signify superior taste."
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Mary Roach |
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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. "Wineries that sell their wines for $500 a bottle have the same problems as wineries that sell their wine for $10 a bottle. You can't make the statement that if it's low-cost..
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Mary Roach |
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plays a game with his wine-marketing classes at Napa Valley College. The students, most of whom have several years' experience in the industry, are asked to rank six wines, their labels hidden by--a nice touch here--brown paper bags. 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 ..
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Mary Roach |
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Unscrupulous vendors turn the situation to their advantage. In China, nouveau-riche status-seekers are spending small fortunes on counterfeit Bordeaux. A related scenario exists here vis-a-vis olive oil. "The United States is a dumping ground for bad olive oil," Langstaff told me. It's no secret among European manufacturers that Americans have no palate for olive oils. The Olive Center--a recent addition to the Robert Mondavi Institute for ..
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Mary Roach |
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Olive trees grow in the same climate and soil conditions as grapes. The olive oil people have been up in Napa Valley all along, going, "Hey, how do we get a piece of this action?"
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Mary Roach |
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For the forces of any given blast, one type may stretch, say, a fifth of its length without tearing, while another may manage just 5 percent. WIAMan will be calibrated to reflect these differences and predict the consequences.
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Mary Roach |
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Another strategy was to target kids. "The human infant enters the world without information about what is edible and what is not," wrote psychologist Paul Rozin, who studied disgust for many years at the University of Pennsylvania. Until kids are around two, you can get them to try pretty much anything, and Rozin did. In one memorable study, he tallied the percentage of children aged sixteen to twenty-nine months who ate or tasted the follo..
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Mary Roach |
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We will be evaluating some nasty oils. You will have to put them in your mouth.* For the good of science. For the good of olive oil. We are here to help the producers, to tell them, What attributes does the oil have, does it have defects, what can they do differently next year--treat the olives better, pick them at a different time, et cetera." There will be no pay. No one will reimburse for the seven-dollar parking-garage fee. The existing..
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Mary Roach |
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there is a point at which efficiency crosses over into lunacy, and the savings in money or resources cease to be worthwhile in light of the price paid in other ways.
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Mary Roach |
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mainstream pet-food manufacturers blend animal fats and meals with soy and wheat grains and add vitamins and minerals. This yields a cheap, nutritious pellet that no one wants to eat.
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Mary Roach |
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Moeller came to AFB from Frito-Lay, where his job was to design, well, powdered flavor coatings for edible extruded shapes. "There are," he allows, "a lot of parallels." A Cheeto without its powdered coating has almost no flavor.* Likewise, the sauces on processed convenience meals are basically palatants for humans."
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Mary Roach |
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Pet foods come in a variety of flavors because that's what we humans like,+ and we assume our pets like what we like. We have that wrong. "For cats especially," Moeller says, "change is often more difficult than monotony."
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Mary Roach |
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cats are more or less "monoguesic," meaning they stick to one food. Outdoor cats tend to be either mousers or birders, not both. But don't worry, as most of the difference between Tuna Treat and Poultry Platter is in the name and the picture on the label. "They may have more fish meal in one and more poultry meal in another," says Moeller, "but the flavors may or may not change."
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Mary Roach |
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The extent to which Americans project their own food qualms and biases onto their pets has lately veered off into the absurd. Some of AFB's clients have begun marketing 100 percent vegetarian kibble for cats. The cat is what's called a true carnivore; its natural diet contains no plants. Moeller tilts his head. A slight lift of the eyebrows. The look says, "Whatever the client wants."
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Mary Roach |
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how to get a cat to finish its vegetables. Pyrophosphates have been described to me as "cat crack." Coat some kibble with it, and you, the pet-food manufacturer, can make up for a whole host of gustatory shortcomings."
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Mary Roach |
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She looks at once like someone who could have worked as a runway model and someone who would be mildly put off to hear that.
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Mary Roach |
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It's like a cat trying to imagine the taste of sugar. Cats, unlike dogs and other omnivores, can't taste sweetness.
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Mary Roach |
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Rodents, on the other hand, are slaves to sweetness. They have been known to die of malnutrition rather than step away from a sugar-water drip. In an obesity study from the 1970s, rats fed an all-you-can-eat "supermarket" diet that included marshmallows, milk chocolate, and chocolate-chip cookies gained 269 percent more weight than rats fed standard laboratory fare. There are strains of mice that will, over the course of a day, consume thei..
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Mary Roach |
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The caption uses the scientific term for lip-licking: "lateral tongue protrusion.")"
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Mary Roach |
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It pulls a "gape": mouth opened wide, tongue stuck out to eject the offending food. (Humans do this too. The scientific term here is "the disgust face.")"
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Mary Roach |
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If it's exceedingly nasty," Reed told me, "they will actually drag their tongue on the bedding to try to get it off." Clearly taste matters to them."
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Mary Roach |
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Rawson points out that although snakes can't taste, they have a primitive sense of smell. They'll extend their tongue to gather volatile molecules and then pull it back in and plug it into the vomeronasal organ at the roof of the mouth to get a reading. Snakes are keenly attuned to the aroma of favored prey--so much so that 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..
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Mary Roach |
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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.")"
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Mary Roach |
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human fetuses have a vomeronasal organ, though no one knows whether it's functional. You can no more ask a fetus about these things than a python. Rawson surmises that the organ is a holdover from "when we were crawling out of the primordial soup,* and we needed to sense the chemicals in the environment and know which ones to go toward or away from."
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Mary Roach |
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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."
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Mary Roach |
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Yes, men and women eat meals. But they also ingest nutrients. They grind and sculpt them into a moistened bolus that is delivered, via a stadium wave of sequential contractions, into a self-kneading sack of hydrochloric acid and then dumped into a tubular leach field, where it is converted into the most powerful taboo in human history. Lunch is an opening act.
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Mary Roach |
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The pole is nonconductive, enabling the savvy rescuer to save a life without joining the growing conga line of electrocution victims.
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Mary Roach |
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Sometimes courage is nothing more than a willingness to think differently than those around you. In a
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Mary Roach |
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What's the main ingredient in AFB's dog-food palatants? "Liver," says Moeller. "Mixed with some other viscera. The first part that a wild animal usually eats in its kill is the liver and stomach, the GI tract." Organs in general are among the most nutritionally giving foods on Earth."
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Mary Roach |
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Home economists were urged to approach teachers and lunch planners. "Let's do more than say 'How do you do' to variety meats; let's make friends with them!" chirps Jessie Alice Cline in the February 1943 Practical Home Economics. The War Food Administration pulled together a Food Conservation Education brochure with suggested variety-meat essay themes ("My Adventures in Eating New Foods")."
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Mary Roach |
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Nirlungayuk reached a similar conclusion. I tracked him down, seventeen years later, and asked him what the outcome of his country-foods campaign had been. "It didn't really work," he said, from his office in the Nunavut department of wildlife and environment. "Kids eat what parents make for them. That's one thing I didn't do is go to the parents."
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Mary Roach |
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The 1940s was the heyday of pledges and oaths.* In Boy Scout halls, homerooms, and Elks lodges, people were accustomed to signing on the dotted line or standing and reciting, one hand raised. Even the Clean Plate Club--dreamed up by a navy commander in 1942--had an oath: "I, ____, being a member in good standing . . . , hereby agree that I will finish all the food on my plate . . . and continue to do so until Uncle Sam has licked the Japs a..
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Mary Roach |
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People like what they eat, rather than eat what they like." The phenomenon starts early. Breast milk and amniotic fluid carry the flavors of the mother's foods, and studies consistently show that babies grow up to be more accepting of flavors they've sampled while in the womb and while breastfeeding. (Babies swallow several ounces of amniotic fluid a day.)"
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Mary Roach |
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Not long ago, a whale biologist named Phillip Clapham sent me a photograph that illustrates the consequences of life without a doorman. Like most creatures that swallow their food whole, sperm whales have a limited-to-nonexistent sense of taste. The photo is a black-and-white still life of twenty-five objects recovered from sperm whale stomachs. It's like Jonah set up housekeeping: a pitcher, a cup, a tube of toothpaste, a strainer, a waste..
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Mary Roach |
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Cows, by virtue of the plentiful and varied bacteria in their rumen, are able to derive energy from things that would pass through a human undigested. The prune pit has a hard, nutritionally blank hull, but the embryo inside provides protein and fat. Rumen bacteria can break down the hull and free these nutrients, though it takes them a few days. DePeters showed me one of the mesh bags. "Sometimes I put a midterm exam in there," he said. Co..
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Mary Roach |
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recruiting sensory panelists to sniff* amniotic fluid (withdrawn during amniocentesis) and breast milk from women who had and those who hadn't swallowed a garlic oil capsule. Panelists agreed: the garlic-eaters' samples smelled like garlic. (The babies didn't appear to mind. On the contrary, the Monell team wrote, "Infants . . . sucked more when the milk smelled like garlic.")"
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Mary Roach |
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Eating organs, in 1943, could degrade one's social standing. Americans preferred bland preparations of muscle meat partly because for as long as they could recall, that's what the upper class ate. So powerful are race- and status-based disgusts that explorers have starved to death rather than eat like the locals. British polar exploration suffered heavily for its mealtime snobbery. "The British believed that Eskimo food . . . was beneath a ..
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Mary Roach |
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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.
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Mary Roach |
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The human brain most resembles that of Jersey cows at about six months."*"
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Mary Roach |
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there are naturally large individual differences in the chemical makeup of people's saliva.
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Mary Roach |
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Most of these seemingly collected by Keith's mother: "Some of the pleasantest recollections of my boyhood are of fried jackrabbit, baked jackrabbit, jackrabbit stew, and jackrabbit pie.")"
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Mary Roach |
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THE GREAT IRONY is that in the beginning, the gut was all there was. "We're basically a highly evolved earthworm surrounding the intestinal tract," Khoruts commented as we drove away from his clinic the last day I was there. Eventually, the food processor had to have a brain attached to help it look for food, and limbs to reach that food. That increased its size, so it needed a circulatory system to distribute the fuel that powered the limb..
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Mary Roach |