The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011

by Mary Roach

  The primal diet has found a sizable following in recent years, particularly in southern California and, for some reason, Chicago. Its founder, Aajonus Vonderplanitz, a sixty-three-year-old former soap-opera actor and self-styled nutritionist, claims that it cured him of autism, angina, dyslexia, juvenile diabetes, multiple myeloma, and stomach cancer, as well as psoriasis, bursitis, osteoporosis, tooth decay, and "mania created by excessive fruit." Vonderplanitz recommends eating roughly 85 percent animal products by volume, supplemented by no more than one fruit a day and a pint or so of "green drink"—a purée of fruits and vegetable juices. (Whole-vegetable fibers, he believes, are largely indigestible.) The diet's most potent component, though, is an occasional serving of what Vonderplanitz calls "high meat."

  Torma ducked into the back of the house and returned with a swing-top jar in his hands. Inside lay a piece of organic beef, badly spoiled. It was afloat in an ocher-colored puddle of its own decay, the muscle and slime indistinguishable, like a slug. High meat is the flesh of any animal that has been allowed to decompose. Torma keeps his portions sealed for up to several weeks before ingesting them, airing them out every few days. (Like the bacteria in sauerkraut, those that cause botulism are anaerobic; fermentation destroys them, but they sometimes survive in sealed meats— botulus, in Latin, means sausage.) Vonderplanitz says that he got high meat and its name from the Eskimos, who savor rotten caribou and seal. A regular serving of decayed heart or liver can have a "tremendous Viagra effect" on the elderly, Vonderplanitz told me recently. The first few bites, though, can be rough going. "I still have some resistance to it," Torma admitted. "But the health benefits! I'm fifty-two now. I started this when I was forty-two, and I feel like I'm in my twenties."

  Primal eating has its detractors: the Times of London recently dubbed it "the silliest diet ever." Most of us find whole vegetables perfectly digestible. The notion that parasites and viruses are good for us would be news to most doctors. And even Vonderplanitz and his followers admit that high meat sometimes leaves them ill and explosively incontinent. They call it detoxification.

  Still, radical measures like these have had some surprising successes. In a case published last year in the Journal of Clinical Gastroenterology, a sixty-one-year-old woman was given an entirely new set of intestinal bacteria. The patient was suffering from severe diarrhea, Janet Jansson, a microbial ecologist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, told me. "She lost twenty-seven kilograms and was confined to a diaper and a wheelchair." To repopulate her colon with healthy microbes, Jansson and her collaborators arranged for a fecal transplant from the patient's husband. "They just put it in a Waring blender and turned it into a suppository," Jansson says. "It sounds disgusting, but it cured her. When we got another sample from her, two days later, she had adopted his microbial community." By then her diarrhea had disappeared.

  Other experiments have been even more dramatic. At Washington University in St. Louis, the biologist Jeff Gordon has found that bacteria can help determine body weight. In a study published in Nature in 2006, Gordon and his lab mates, led by Peter Turnbaugh, took a group of germ-free mice, raised in perfect sterility, and divided it in two. One group was inoculated with bacteria from normal mice; the other with bacteria from mice that had been bred to be obese. Both groups gained weight after the inoculation, but those with bacteria from obese mice had nearly twice the percentage of body fat by the end of the experiment. Later the same lab took normal mice, fed them until they were fat, and transplanted their bacteria into other normal mice. Those mice grew fat, too, and the same pattern held true when the mice were given bacteria from obese people. "It's a positive-feedback loop," Ruth Ley, a biologist from Gordon's lab who now teaches at Cornell, told me. "Whether you're genetically obese or obese from a high-fat diet, you end up with a microbial community that is particularly good at extracting calories. It could mean that an obese person can extract an extra five or ten calories out of a bowl of Cheerios."

  Biologists no longer doubt the depth of our dependence on bacteria. Jansson avoids antibiotics unless they're the only option and eats probiotic foods like yogurt and prebiotic foods like yacón, a South American root that nourishes bacteria in the gut. Until we understand more about this symbiosis, she and others say, it's best to ingest the cultures we know and trust. "What's beautiful about fermenting vegetables is that they're naturally populated by lactic-acid bacteria," Katz said. "Raw flesh is sterile. You're just culturing whatever was on the knife."

  When Torma unclamped his jar, a sickly sweet miasma filled the air—an odor as natural as it was repellent. Decaying meat produces its own peculiar scent molecules, I later learned, with names like putrescine and cadaverine. I could still smell them on my clothes hours later. Torma stuck two fingers down the jar and fished out a long, wet sliver. "Want a taste?" he said.

  It was the end of a long day. I'd spent most of it consuming everything set before me: ants, acorns, raw milk, dumpster stew, and seven kinds of mead, among other delicacies. But even Katz took a pass on high meat. While Torma threw back his head and dropped in his portion, like a seal swallowing a mackerel, we quietly took our leave. "You have to trust your senses," Katz said, as we were driving away. "To me, that smelled like death."

  Katz has lived with HIV for almost two decades. For many years he medicated himself with his own ferments and local herbs—chickweed, yellow dock, violet leaf, burdock root. But periodic tests at the AIDS clinic in Nashville showed that his T-cell count was still low. Then, in the late nineties, he began to lose weight. He often felt listless and mildly nauseated. At first, he assumed that he was just depressed, but the symptoms got worse. "I started feeling lightheaded a lot and I had a couple of fainting episodes," he told me. "It dawned on me very slowly that I was suffering from classic AIDS wasting syndrome."

  By then an effective cocktail of AIDS drugs had been available for almost three years. Katz had seen it save the life of one of his neighbors in Tennessee. "It was a really dramatic turnaround," he told me. "But I didn't want my life to be medically managed. I had a real reluctance to get on that treadmill." In the summer of 1999, he took a road trip to Maine to visit friends, hoping to snap out of his funk. By the time he got there, he was so exhausted that he couldn't get up for days. "I remember what really freaked me out was trying to balance my checkbook," he says. "I couldn't even do simple subtraction. It was like my brain wasn't functioning anymore." He had reached the end of his alternatives.

  Katz doesn't doubt that the cocktail saved his life. In pictures from that trip, his eyes are hollowed out, his neck so thin that it juts from his woolen sweater like a broomstick. He got worse before he got better, he says—"It was like I had an anvil in my stomach." But one morning, about a month after his first dose, he woke up and felt like going for a walk. A few days after that, he had a strong urge to chop wood. He now takes three antiretroviral and protease-inhibitor drugs every day and hasn't had a major medical problem in ten years. He still doesn't have the stamina he'd like, and his forehead is often beaded with sweat, even on cool evenings around the commune's dinner table. "I wish this weren't my reality," he told me. "I don't feel great that my life is medically managed. But if that's what's keeping me alive, hallelujah."

  It's this part that incenses some of his readers: having sung the praises of sauerkraut, revealed the secrets of kombucha, and gestured toward the green pastures of raw milk, Katz has surrendered to the false promise of Western medicine. His drug dependence is a sellout, they say—an act of bad faith. "Every two months or so, I get a letter from some well-meaning person who's decided that they have to tell me that I'm believing a lie," he told me. "That the HIV is meaningless and doesn't make people sick. That if I follow this link and read the truth, I will be freed from that lie and will stop having to take toxic pills and live happily ever after." Live cultures have been part of his healing, he said. They may even help prevent diseases like cancer. "But that doesn't mean that kombucha will cure your diabetes. It doesn't mean that
sauerkraut cured my AIDS."

  The trouble with being a diet guru, it seems, is that the more reasonable you try to be, the more likely you are to offend your most fervent followers. The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved includes a chapter called "Vegetarian Ethics and Humane Meat." It begins, "I love meat. The smell of it cooking can fill me with desire, and I find its juicy, rich flavor uniquely satisfying." Katz goes on to describe his dismay at commercial meat production, his respect for vegetarianism, and his halfhearted attempts to embrace it. "When I tried being vegan, I found myself dreaming about eggs," he writes. "I could find no virtue in denying my desires. I now understand that many nutrients are soluble only in fats, and animal fats can be vehicles of rich nourishment."

  Needless to say, this argument didn't fly with much of his audience. Last year the Canadian vegan punk band Propagandhi re-leased a song called "Human (e) Meat (The Flensing of Sandor Katz)." Flensing is an archaic locution of the sort beloved by metal bands: it means to strip the blubber from a whale. "I swear I did my best to insure that his final moments were swift and free from fear," the singer yelps. "But consideration should be made for the fact that Sandor Katz was my first kill." He goes on to describe searing every hair on Katz's body, boiling his head in a stockpot, and turning it into a spreadable headcheese. "It's a horrible song," Katz told me. "When it came out, I was not amused. I had a little fear that some lost vegan youth would try to find meaning by carrying out this fantasy. But it's grown on me."

  The moon was in Sagittarius on the last night of April, the stars out in their legions. Katz and I had arrived in the Smoky Mountains to join the gathering of the Green Path. About sixty people were camped on a sparsely wooded slope half an hour west of Asheville. Tents, lean-tos, and sleeping bags were scattered among the trees below an open shed where meals were served: dandelion greens, nettle pesto, kava brownies—the usual. In a clearing nearby, an oak branch had been stripped and erected as a maypole, and a fire pit dug for the night's ceremony: the ancient festival of Beltane, or Walpurgisnacht.

  We'd spent the day going on plant walks, taking wildcrafting lessons, and listening to a succession of seekers and sages—Turtle, 7Song, Learning Deer. Every few hours a cry would go up, and the tribe would gather for an adult version of what kindergartners call Circle Time: everyone holding hands and exchanging expressions of self-conscious wonder. The women wore their hair long and loose or bobbed like pixies'; their noses were pierced and their bodies wrapped in rag scarves and patterned skirts. The men, in dreadlocks and piratical buns, talked of Babylon and polyamory. The children ran heedlessly through the woods, needing no instruction in the art of absolute freedom. "Is your son home-schooled?" I asked one mother, who crisscrossed the country with her two children and a tepee and was known as the Queen of Roadkill. She laughed. "He's unschooled," she said. "He just learns as he goes."

  The Green Path was part ecological retreat and part pagan revival meeting, but mostly it was a memorial for its founder, Frank Cook, who had died a year earlier. Cook was a botanist and teacher who traveled around the world collecting herbal lore, then writing and lecturing about it back in the U.S. He lived by barter and donation, refusing to be tied down by full-time work or a single residence, and was, by all accounts, an uncommonly gifted teacher. (He and Katz often taught seminars together.) As a patron saint, though, Cook had left his flock with an uneasy legacy. When he died at forty-six, it was owing to a tapeworm infection acquired on his travels. Antibiotics might have cured him, but he mostly avoided them. By the time his mother and friends forced him to go to a hospital last spring, his brain was riddled with tapeworm larvae and the cysts that formed around them. "Frank was pretty dogmatic about Western medicine," Katz said. "And I really think that's why he's dead."

  Around the bonfire that night, I could see Katz on the other side of the circle, holding hands with his neighbors. After eighteen years in the wilderness, he couldn't imagine moving back to New York City—a weekend there could still wear him out. Yet his mind had never entirely left the Upper West Side, and his voice, clipped and skeptical, was a welcome astringent here. After a while a woman stepped into the firelight, dressed in a long white gown with a crown of vines and spring flowers in her hair. Beltane was a time of ancient ferment, she said, when the powers of the sky come down and the powers of the earth rise up to meet them. She took two goblets and carried them to opposite points in the circle. They were full of May wine steeped with sweet woodruff, once considered an aphrodisiac. On this night, by our own acts of love and procreation, we would remind the fields and crops to grow.

  There was more along those lines, though I confess that I didn't hear it. I was watching the kid to my left—a scruffy techno-peasant dressed in what looked like sackcloth and bark—take a swig of the wine. The goblets were moving clockwise around the circle, I'd noticed. By the time the other goblet reached me, thirty or forty people would have drunk from it.

  I heard a throat being cleared somewhere in the crowd, and a cough quickly stifled. Embracing live cultures shouldn't mean sacrificing basic hygiene, Katz had told me that afternoon, after his sauerkraut seminar. "Part of respecting bacteria is recognizing where they can cause us problems." And so, when the kid had drunk his fill, I tapped his shoulder and asked for the goblet out of turn. I took a quick sip, sweet and bitter in equal measure. Then I watched as the wine made its way around the circle—teeming, as all things must, with an abundance of invisible life.

  The Chemist's War

  Deborah Blum

  FROM Slate

  IT WAS CHRISTMAS EVE 1926, the streets aglitter with snow and lights, when the man afraid of Santa Claus stumbled into the emergency room at New York City's Bellevue Hospital. He was flushed, gasping with fear: Santa Claus, he kept telling the nurses, was just behind him, wielding a baseball bat.

  Before hospital staff realized how sick he was—the alcoholinduced hallucination was just a symptom—the man died. So did another holiday partygoer. And another. As dusk fell on Christmas, the hospital staff tallied up more than sixty people made desperately ill by alcohol and eight dead from it. Within the next two days, yet another twenty-three people died in the city from celebrating the season.

  Doctors were accustomed to alcohol poisoning by then, a routine of life in the Prohibition era. The bootlegged whiskeys and so-called gins often made people sick. The liquor produced in hidden stills frequently came tainted with metals and other impurities. But this outbreak was bizarrely different. The deaths, as investigators would shortly realize, came courtesy of the U.S. government.

  Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.

  Although mostly forgotten today, the "chemist's war of Prohibition" remains one of the strangest and most deadly decisions in American law-enforcement history. As one of its most outspoken opponents, Charles Norris, the chief medical examiner of New York City during the 1920s, liked to say, it was "our national experiment in extermination." Poisonous alcohol still kills—sixteen people died just this month after drinking lethal booze in Indonesia, where bootleggers make their own brews to avoid steep taxes—but that's due to unscrupulous businessmen rather than government order.

  I learned of the federal poisoning program while researching my new book, The Poisoner's Handbook, which is set in jazz-age New York. My first reaction was that I must have gotten it wrong. "I never heard that the government poisoned people during Prohibition, did you?" I kept saying to friends, family members, colleagues.

  I did, however, remember the U.S. government's controversial decision in the 1970s to spray Mexican marijuana fields with P
araquat, a herbicide. It was primarily intended to destroy crops, but government officials also insisted that awareness of the toxin would deter marijuana smokers. They echoed the official position of the 1920s—if some citizens ended up poisoned, well, they'd brought it upon themselves. Although Paraquat wasn't really all that toxic, the outcry forced the government to drop the plan. Still, the incident created an unsurprising lack of trust in government motives, which reveals itself in the occasional rumors circulating today that federal agencies, such as the CIA, mix poison into the illegal drug supply.

  During Prohibition, however, an official sense of higher purpose kept the poisoning program in place. As the Chicago Tribune editorialized in 1927: "Normally, no American government would engage in such business ... It is only in the curious fanaticism of Prohibition that any means, however barbarous, are considered justified." Others, however, accused lawmakers opposed to the poisoning plan of being in cahoots with criminals and argued that bootleggers and their law-breaking alcoholic customers deserved no sympathy. "Must Uncle Sam guarantee safety first for souses?" asked Nebraska's Omaha Bee.