What We Find Gross, and Why
By ROBIN MARANTZ HENIG
Published: January 20, 2012
"Did you hear the one about the Texan at his first Passover Seder? He was mightily impressed with the soup. “These matzo balls sure are delicious, ma’am,” he told his hostess. “What other parts of the matzo do y’all cook with?”
This old joke came to mind as I read “That’s Disgusting,” a lively look at all things revolting by Rachel Herz, a psychologist at Brown. I thought of it as Herz described an evening with friends at a pretentious restaurant, where she ordered the appetizer special, duck oysters. It turned out “oysters” was code for “testicles” — how come her dinner companions hadn’t warned her? — and once she knew that, she lost her appetite for the small bulb-shaped delicacies. It occurred to me that I might never look at matzo ball soup — or oysters — the same way again.
Most of the grossest food described here isn’t disguised body parts, though, but stuff that’s fermented. “Controlled rot tastes good,” Herz writes, introducing food like hakarl, the desiccated shark meat eaten in Iceland, or natto, a slimy soybean dish from Japan. Tastes good? Really? It’s hard to believe that about casu marzu (Sardinia’s “maggot cheese”), which is covered in writhing, wormlike insect larvae. Eating a hunk of fermented sheep’s milk coated in live maggots tastes good? Yuck.
Or how about chicha, a popular drink in Ecuador, which a student of Herz’s watched as it was made? To prepare the thick beverage, a group of women put handfuls of corn flour in their mouths, chewed it until it “vaguely resembled the vomit of an infant,” spit it out into a collective milk jug and repeated the process until all the flour was gone. Then the women capped the jug and buried it in the yard to ferment. When a well-aged jug of chicha was unearthed and opened for the grossed-out young woman to taste, it took all her self-control not to gag on the warm, vinegary brew.
Too disgusting for you? Here’s one more, my own personal last straw: the information that in China, “chefs can serve you monkey brains from a living monkey sitting at your feet with its skull carved open.”
This is the point at which I wrote, “O.K., that does it,” in the margin — and I was only on Page 17. Still to come were descriptions of mucus, semen, blood (both menstrual and nonmenstrual), vomit, pus, feces, phlegm; stories about slasher porn, cannibalism, necrophilia; and Herz’s attempt to tie it all together with explanations of how disgust evolved, how it protects us, how it works in our brains, and how it keeps us from having to confront our own weaknesses and our own inevitable death.
Just reading that list was pretty vile, wasn’t it? And that’s the tightrope Herz has to walk, though she manages it quite admirably: to be vivid and true to her subject without getting so revolting that her readers react the way we react to anything that disgusts us, which is by trying to get as far away as possible. ..."
For the rest of the review, click here.
On Sale January 23, 2012.
An entertaining and revealing look at the science behind the emotion of disgust.
Disgust originated to prevent us from eating poisonous food, but this simple safety mechanism has since evolved into a uniquely human emotion that dictates how we treat others, shapes our cultural norms, and even has implications for our mental and physical health. That’s Disgusting illuminates the science behind disgust, tackling such colorful topics as cannibalism, humor, and pornography to address larger questions: Why do sources of disgust vary among people and societies? Where does disgust come from in our brain and what deeper fears does it reflect? How does disgust influence our individual personalities, our daily lives, and our values? It turns out that disgust underlies more than we realize, from political ideologies to the lure of horror movies. Drawing on surprising research in psychology and evolutionary biology, That’s Disgusting shows us that disgust mirrors human nature and, as a result, is as complex and varied as we are.
