Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal Read online

  Dedication

  For Lily and Phoebe,

  and my brother Rip

  Contents

  Cover

  Title

  Dedication

  Introduction

  1 • Nose Job: Tasting has little to do with taste

  2 • I’ll Have the Putrescine: Your pet is not like you

  3 • Liver and Opinions: Why we eat what we eat and despise the rest

  4 • The Longest Meal: Can thorough chewing lower the national debt?

  5 • Hard to Stomach: The acid relationship of William Beaumont and Alexis St. Martin

  6 • Spit Gets a Polish: Someone ought to bottle the stuff

  7 • A Bolus of Cherries: Life at the oral processing lab

  8 • Big Gulp: How to survive being swallowed alive

  9 • Dinner’s Revenge: Can the eaten eat back?

  10 • Stuffed: The science of eating yourself to death

  11 • Up Theirs: The alimentary canal as criminal accomplice

  12 • Inflammable You: Fun with hydrogen and methane

  13 • Dead Man’s Bloat: And other diverting tales from the history of flatulence research

  14 • Smelling a Rat: Does noxious flatus do more than clear a room?

  15 • Eating Backward: Is the digestive tract a two-way street?

  16 • I’m All Stopped Up: Elvis Presley’s megacolon, and other ruminations on death by constipation

  17 • The Ick Factor: We can cure you, but there’s just one thing

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  Copyright

  Also by Mary Roach

  Introduction

  IN 1968, on the Berkeley campus of the University of California, six young men undertook an irregular and unprecedented act. Despite the setting and the social climate of the day, it involved no civil disobedience or mind-altering substances. Given that it took place in the nutritional sciences department, I cannot even say with confidence that the participants wore bell-bottomed pants or sideburns of unusual scope. I know only the basic facts: the six men stepped inside a metabolic chamber and remained for two days, testing meals made from dead bacteria.

  This was the fevered dawn of space exploration; NASA had Mars on its mind. A spacecraft packed with all the food necessary for a two-year mission would be impracticably heavy to launch. Thus there was a push to develop menu items that could be “bioregenerated,” that is to say, farmed on elements of the astronauts’ waste. The title of the paper nicely sums the results: “Human Intolerance to Bacteria as Food.” Leaving aside the vomiting and vertigo, the thirteen bowel movements in twelve hours from Subject H, one hopes the aesthetics alone would have tabled further research. Pale gray Aerobacter, served as a “slurry,” was reported to be unpleasantly slimy. H. eutropha had a “halogen-like taste.”

  Some in the field looked askance at the work. I found this quote in a chapter on fabricated space foods: “Men and women . . . do not ingest nutrients, they consume food. More than that, they . . . eat meals. Although to the single-minded biochemist or physiologist, this aspect of human behavior may appear to be irrelevant or even frivolous, it is nevertheless a deeply ingrained part of the human situation.”

  The point is well taken. In their zeal for a solution, the Berkeley team would appear to have lost a bit of perspective. When you can identify the taste of street lighting, it may be time to take a break from experimental nutrition. But I wish to say a word in defense of the “single-minded biochemist or physiologist.” As a writer, I live for these men and women, the scientists who tackle the questions no one else thinks—or has the courage—to ask: the gastric pioneer William Beaumont, with his tongue through the fistulated hole in his houseboy’s stomach; the Swedish physician Algot Key-Åberg, propping cadavers in dining room chairs to study their holding capacity; François Magendie, the first man to identify the chemical constituents of intestinal gas, aided in his investigation by four French prisoners guillotined in the act of digesting their last meal; David Metz, the Philadelphia dyspepsia expert who shot X-ray footage of a competitive eater downing hotdogs two at a time, to see what it might reveal about indigestion; and, of course, our Berkeley nutritionists, spooning bacteria onto dinnerware and stepping back like nervous chefs to see how it goes. The meals were a flop, but the experiment, for better or worse, inspired this book.

  When it comes to literature about eating, science has been a little hard to hear amid the clamor of cuisine. Just as we adorn sex with the fancy gold-leaf filigree of love, so we dress the need for sustenance in the finery of cooking and connoisseurship. I adore the writings of M. F. K. Fisher and Calvin Trillin, but I adore no less Michael Levitt (“Studies of a Flatulent Patient”), J. C. Dalton (“Experimental Investigations to Determine Whether the Garden Slug Can Live in the Human Stomach”), and P. B. Johnsen (“A Lexicon of Pond-Raised Catfish Flavor Descriptors”). I’m not saying I don’t appreciate a nice meal. I’m saying that the human equipment—and the delightful, unusual people who study it—are at least as interesting as the photogenic arrangements we push through it.

  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.

  MY INTRODUCTION TO human anatomy was missing a good deal of its own. It took the form of a headless, limbless molded-plastic torso* in Mrs. Claflin’s science classroom. The chest and rib cage were sheared away, as if by some unspeakable industrial accident, leaving a set of removable organs in full and lurid view. The torso stood on a table in the back of the room, enduring daily evisceration and reassembly at the hands of fifth graders. The idea was to introduce young minds to the geography of their own interior, and at this it failed terribly. The organs fit together like puzzle pieces, tidy as wares in a butcher’s glass case.* The digestive tract came out in parts, esophagus separate from stomach, stomach from intestines. A better teaching tool would have been the knitted digestive tract that made the rounds of the Internet a few years ago: a single tube from mouth to rectum.

  Tube isn’t quite the right metaphor, as it implies a sameness throughout. The tract is more of a railroad flat: a long structure, one room opening onto the next, though each with a distinctive look and purpose. Just as you would never mistake kitchen for bedroom, you would not, from the perspective of a tiny alimentary traveler, mistake mouth for stomach for colon.

  I have toured the tube from that tiny traveler’s perspective, by way of a pill cam: an undersized digital camera shaped like an oversized multivitamin. A pill cam documents its travels like a teenager with a smartphone, grabbing snapshots second by second as it moves along. Inside the stomach, the images are murky green with bits of drifting sediment. It’s like footage from a Titanic documentary. In a matter of hours, acids, enzymes, and the stomach’s muscular churning reduce all but the most resilient bits of food (and pill cams) to a gruel called chyme.

  Eventually even a pill cam is sent on down the line. As it breaches the pylorus—the portal from the stomach to the small intestine—the décor changes abruptly. The walls of the small intestine are baloney pink and lush with millimeter-long projections called villi. Villi increase the surface area available for absorbing nutrients. They are the tiny loops on the terry cloth. The inside surface of the colon, by contrast, is shiny-smooth as Cling Wrap. It would not make a good bath towel. The colon and rectum—the farthest reaches of the digestive tract—are primarily a waste-management facility: they store i
t, dry it out.

  Function was not hinted at in Mrs. Claflin’s educational torso man. Interior surfaces were hidden. The small intestine and colon were presented as a single fused ravelment, like a brain that had been thrown against the wall. Yet I owe the guy a debt of thanks. To venture beyond the abdominal wall, even a plastic one, was to pull back the curtain on life itself. I found it both appalling and compelling, all the more so because I knew a parallel world existed within my own pinkish hull. I mark that fifth-grade classroom as the point at which curiosity began to push aside disgust or fear or whatever it is that so reliably deflects mind from body.

  The early anatomists had that curiosity in spades. They entered the human form like an unexplored continent. Parts were named like elements of geography: the isthmus of the thyroid, the isles of the pancreas, the straits and inlets of the pelvis. The digestive tract was for centuries known as the alimentary canal. How lovely to picture one’s dinner making its way down a tranquil, winding waterway, digestion and excretion no more upsetting or off-putting than a cruise along the Rhine. It’s this mood, these sentiments—the excitement of exploration and the surprises and delights of travel to foreign locales—that I hope to inspire with this book.

  It may take some doing. The prevailing attitude is one of disgust. There are people, anorexics, so repulsed by the thought of their food inside them that they cannot bring themselves to eat. In Brahmin Hindu tradition, saliva is so potent a ritual pollutant that a drop of one’s own spittle on the lips is a kind of defilement. I remember, for my last book, talking to the public-affairs staff who choose what to stream on NASA TV. The cameras are often parked on the comings and goings of Mission Control. If someone spots a staffer eating lunch at his desk, the camera is quickly repositioned. In a restaurant setting, conviviality distracts us from the biological reality of nutrient intake and oral processing. But a man alone with a sandwich appears as what he is: an organism satisfying a need. As with other bodily imperatives, we’d rather not be watched. Feeding, and even more so its unsavory correlates, are as much taboos as mating and death.

  The taboos have worked in my favor. The alimentary recesses hide a lode of unusual stories, mostly unmined. Authors have profiled the brain, the heart, the eyes, the skin, the penis and the female geography, even the hair,* but never the gut. The pie hole and the feed chute are mine.

  Like a bite of something yummy, you will begin at one end and make your way to the other. Though this is not a practical health book, your more pressing alimentary curiosities will be addressed. And some less pressing. Could thorough chewing lower the national debt? If saliva is full of bacteria, why do animals lick their wounds? Why don’t suicide bombers smuggle bombs in their rectums? Why don’t stomachs digest themselves? Why is crunchy food so appealing? Can constipation kill you? Did it kill Elvis?

  You will occasionally not believe me, but my aim is not to disgust. I have tried, in my way, to exercise restraint. I am aware of the website www.poopreport.com, but I did not visit. When I stumbled on the paper “Fecal Odor of Sick Hedgehogs Mediates Olfactory Attraction of the Tick” in the references of another paper, I resisted the urge to order a copy. I don’t want you to say, “This is gross.” I want you to say, “I thought this would be gross, but it’s really interesting.” Okay, and maybe a little gross.

  * * *

  * Similar products exist to this day, under names like “Dual Sex Human Torso with Detachable Head” and “Deluxe 16-Part Human Torso,” adding an illicit serial-killer, sex-crime thrill to educational supply catalogues.

  * In reality, guts are more stew than meat counter, a fact that went underappreciated for centuries. So great was the Victorian taste for order that displaced organs constituted a medical diagnosis. Doctors had been misled not by plastic models, but by cadavers and surgical patients—whose organs ride higher because the body is horizontal. The debut of X-rays, for which patients sit up and guts slosh downward, spawned a fad for surgery on “dropped organs”—hundreds of body parts needlessly hitched up and sewn in place.

  * The Hair, by Charles Henri Leonard, published in 1879. It was from Leonard that I learned of a framed display of presidential hair, currently residing in the National Museum of American History and featuring snippets from the first fourteen presidents, including a coarse, yellow-gray, “somewhat peculiar” lock from John Quincy Adams. Leonard, himself moderately peculiar, calculated that “a single head of hair of average growth and luxuriousness in any audience of two hundred people will hold supported that entire audience” and, I would add, render an evening at the theater so much the more memorable.

  1

  Nose Job

  TASTING HAS LITTLE TO DO WITH TASTE

  THE SENSORY ANALYST rides a Harley. There are surely many things she enjoys about traveling by motorcycle, but the one Sue Langstaff mentions to me is the way the air, the great and odorous out-of-doors, is shoved into her nose. It’s a big, lasting passive sniff.* This is why dogs stick their heads out the car window. It’s not for the feeling of the wind in their hair. When you have a nose like a dog has, or Sue Langstaff, you take in the sights by smell. Here is California’s Highway 29 between Napa and St. Helena, through Langstaff’s nose: cut grass, diesel from the Wine Train locomotive, sulfur being sprayed on grapes, garlic from Bottega Ristorante, rotting vegetation from low tide on the Napa River, toasting oak from the Demptos cooperage, hydrogen sulfide from the Calistoga mineral baths, grilling meat and onions from Gott’s drive-in, alcohol evaporating off the open fermenters at Whitehall Lane Winery, dirt from a vineyard tiller, smoking meats at Mustards Grill, manure, hay.

  Tasting—in the sense of “wine-tasting” and of what Sue Langstaff does when she evaluates a product—is mostly smelling. The exact verb would be flavoring, if that could be a verb in the same way tasting and smelling are. Flavor is a combination of taste (sensory input from the surface of the tongue) and smell, but mostly it’s the latter. Humans perceive five tastes—sweet, bitter, salty, sour, and umami (brothy)—and an almost infinite number of smells. Eighty to ninety percent of the sensory experience of eating is olfaction. Langstaff could throw away her tongue and still do a reasonable facsimile of her job.

  Her job. It is a kind of sensory forensics. “People come to me and say, ‘My wine stinks. What happened?’” Langstaff can read the stink. Off-flavors—or “defects,” in the professional’s parlance—are clues to what went wrong. An olive oil with a flavor of straw or hay suggests a problem with desiccated olives. A beer with a “hospital” smell is an indication that the brewer may have used chlorinated water, even just to rinse the equipment. The wine flavors “leather” and “horse sweat” are tells for the spoilage yeast Brettanomyces.

  The nose is a fleshly gas chromatograph. As you chew food or hold wine in the warmth of your mouth, aromatic gases are set free. As you exhale, these “volatiles” waft up through the posterior nares—the internal nostrils* at the back of the mouth—and connect with olfactory receptors in the upper reaches of the nasal cavity. (The technical name for this internal smelling is retronasal olfaction. The more familiar sniffing of aromas through the external nostrils is called orthonasal olfaction.) The information is passed on to the brain, which scans for a match. 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.

  Like this: “Dried cherries. Molasses—blackstrap.” Langstaff is sniffing a strong, dark ale called Noel. We are at Beer Revolution, an amply stocked, mildly skunky† bar in Oakland, California, where I have an office (in the city, not the bar) and Langstaff has a parent in the hospital. She could use a drink, and we have four. For demonstration purposes.

  In general, Langstaff isn’t a talky person. Her sentences present in low, unhurried tones without italics or exclamation points. 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 strai
ghter 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 nibs . . .”

  I sniff the ale. I sip it, push it around my mouth, draw blanks. I can tell it’s intense and complex, but I don’t recognize any of the components of what I’m experiencing. Why can’t I do this? Why is it so hard to find words for flavors and smells? For one thing, smell, unlike our other senses, isn’t consciously processed. The input goes straight to the emotion and memory centers. Langstaff’s first impression of a scent or flavor may be a flash of color, an image, a sense of warm or cool, rather than a word. Smoking jackets in a glass of Noel, Christmas trees in a hoppy, resinous India pale ale.

  It’s this too: Humans are better equipped for sight than for smell. We process visual input ten times faster than olfactory. Visual and cognitive cues handily trump olfactory ones, a fact famously demonstrated in a 2001 collaboration between a sensory scientist and a team of oenologists (wine scientists) at the University of Bordeaux in Talence, France. Fifty-four oenology students were asked to use standard wine-flavor descriptors to describe a red wine and a white wine. In a second round of tasting, the same white wine was paired with a “red,” which was actually the same white wine yet again but secretly colored red. (Tests were run to make sure the red coloring didn’t affect the flavor.) In describing the red-colored white wine, the students dropped the white wine terms they’d used in the first round in favor of red wine descriptors. “Because of the visual information,” the authors wrote, “the tasters discounted the olfactory information.” They believed they were tasting red wine.

  Verbal facility with smells and flavors doesn’t come naturally. As babies, we learn to talk by naming what we see. “Baby points to a lamp, mother says, ‘Yes, a lamp,’” says Johan Lundström, a biological psychologist with the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. “Baby smells an odor, mother says nothing.” All our lives, we communicate through visuals. No one, with a possible exception made for Sue Langstaff, would say, “Go left at the smell of simmering hotdogs.”