Quotes from Mary Roach

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.")

Higher-end detergents contain at least three digestive enzymes: amylase to break down starchy stains, protease for proteins, and lipase for greasy stains (not just edible fats but body oils like sebum). Laundry detergent is essentially a digestive tract in a box. Ditto dishwashing detergent: protease and lipase eat the food your dinner guests didn't. Credit

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.

Fletcherism. The U.S. Army Medical Department issued formal instructions for a "Method of Attaining Economic Assimilation of Nutriment"—aka the Fletcher system. ("Masticate all solid food until it is completely liquefied," begins the familiar refrain.)

Crispy foods carry a uniquely powerful appeal. I asked Chen what might lie behind this seemingly universal drive to crunch things in our mouths. "I believe human being has a destructive nature in its genes," he answered. "Human has a strange way of stress-release by punching, kicking, smashing, or other forms of destructive actions. Eating could be one of them. The action of teeth crushing food is a destructive process, and we receive pleasure from that, or become de-stressed.

Expert economics coming to the assistance of ambitious unintelligence." Let them chew cake.

phalloplasty—crafting a working penis from other parts of a patient's body—has

It's hard to say where is the bigger hubris, in their convictions or in the arrogance of carrying them to a third decimal point

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 in light of the price paid in other ways.

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." Nancy

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 to swallow it.

In 1817, d'Arcet Jr., a chemist by trade, came up with a method for extracting gelatin from bones (and money from Parisian welfare coffers). Public hospitals and poorhouses, having swallowed the preposterous claim that two ounces of d'Arcet's gelatin was the nutritional equivalent of three-plus pounds of meat, began serving soup made with the gelatin. So plentiful were

No man got an erection from looking at "brown string sandals.

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.")

comparing traditional bouillon with gelatin-based broth. The latter was "more distasteful, more putrescible, less digestible, less nutritious, and . . . moreover, it often brought on diarrhea.

There is one thing dead people excel at. They're

Most of us pass our lives never once laying eyes on our organs, the most precious and amazing things we own. Until something goes wrong, we barely give them thought. This seems strange to me. How is it that we find Christina Aguilera more interesting than the inside of our own bodies? It is, of course, possible that I seem strange. You may be thinking, Wow, that Mary Roach has her head up her ass. To which I say: Only briefly, and with the utmost respect.

The public filed past Elmer in his casket, looking every bit the soldier and nothing at all the decomposing body.

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.

The heyday of spiritualism--with its seances and spirit communications zinging through the ether--coincided with the dawn of the electric age. The generation that so readily embraced spiritualism was the same generation that had been asked to accept such seeming witchery as electricity, telegraphy, radio waves, and telephonic communications--disembodied voices mysteriously travelling through space and emerging from a receiver hundreds of miles distant

Of relevant interest, an 1859 issue of California Farmer and Journal of Useful Sciences offers a recipe* for a nutritional extract made from Peruvian seabird guano.

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.

two to three tablespoonfuls was equal to two pounds of meat, with the advantage that it lends to the laborers' potatoes and peas "a very agreeable taste!

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.