Quotes from Mary Roach

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.

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.

I am skeptical, only because I have read the 1978 paper by researchers at Pennsylvania State University who tried to warn away white-tailed deer by erecting roadside plywood cutouts of deer rear ends with tails a-flagging. On some, the raised tail was painted white; on others, an actual deer tail had been nailed in place. Sadly, because who wouldn't want to see our nation's highways lined with plywood deer asses with decomposing tails, none of it worked.

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.

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.

As one former anatomy instructor said to me, "No one's taking heads home in buckets anymore.

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

Pharmaceutical companies make money by treating diseases, not by curing them.

Flawed as it is, Science remains the most solid god ive got. Science has the answer to ever question that can be asked.

the little-known fact that the last portion of a man's ejaculate contains a natural spermicide- not intended to kill his own soldiers, obviously, but to annihilate the seed of any who come after him.

I'm always saying, 'After I die, just put me out there and blow me up.

YOU NEVER THINK about the weight of your organs inside you. Your heart is a half-pound clapper hanging off the end of your aorta. Your arms burden your shoulders like buckets on a yoke. The colon uses the uterus as a beanbag chair. Even the weight of your hair imparts a sensation on your scalp. In weightlessness, all this disappears. You organs float inside your torso.* The result is a subtle physical euphoria, an indescribable sense of being freed from something you did not realize was there.

They are the same tribal laborers that the British brought in from central India. They use them because they are considered hardworking and obedient.

I make lists to keep my anxiety level down. If I write down 15 things to be done, I lose that vague, nagging sense that there are an overwhelming number of things to be done, all of which are on the brink of being forgotten.

I have a list of party guests in my desk drawer that dates from around 1997. Every so often I take it out and add the people we've met, cross off the couples that have moved away, and then put it back in my drawer. I long ago came to accept that we're never actually going to have this party; we're just going to keep updating the list—which, for people like me, is a party all by itself.

By the end of the conference, there was a sense that removing the junk is actually possible. I've gone from being totally skeptical to thinking maybe something will work, Kessler says. We can bring things down; it's just going to cost a lot.

An hour? What do you do with a dead person for an hour? Mom had been sick for a long time; we'd done our grieving and crying and saying goodbye. It was like being served a slice of pie you didn't want to eat. We felt it would be rude to leave, after all the trouble they'd gone to.

Taste - as in personal preference, discernment - is subjective. It's emphemeral, shaped by trends and fads. It's one part mouth and nose, two parts ego.

Dead people make NASA uncomfortable. They don't use the word cadaver in their documents and publications, preferring the new euphemism postmortem human subject (or, yet more cagily, PMHS).

A Dr. Courtney W. Shropshire, writing in 1912, was impressed to note that by means of "a special prostatic applicator, well lubricated, attached to the vibrator, introduced to the rectum" he was "able to empty the seminal vesicles of their secretions." Indeedy.

Being dead is absurd. It's the silliest situation you'll find yourself in. Your limbs are floppy and uncooperative. Your mouth hangs open. Being dead is unsightly and stinky and embarrassing, and there's not a damn thing to be done about it.

The Virtual Birth Center tells us how to prepare Placenta Cocktail (8 oz. V-8, 2 ice cubes, ½ cup carrot, and ¼ cup raw placenta, puréed in a blender for 10 seconds), Placenta Lasagna, and Placenta Pizza.

The device was named after Dr. Joseph Ignace Guillotin, though he did not invent it. He merely lobbied for its use, on the grounds that the decapitating machine, as he preferred to call it, was an instantaneous, and thus more humane, way to kill.

You may be wondering: Could Ella Fitzgerald explode your liver? She could not.