Tasty

by John McQuaid

  The sense of disgust evolves over the course of a lifetime. As children grow into adults, their social interactions become more complicated. At the same time, they pick up on social rules. Both of these imprint themselves on the brain. As people reach adulthood, the personal universe of disgust expands exponentially. Rozin and his colleague Jonathan Haidt divided it into four categories: inappropriate sexual acts, poor hygiene, death, and violations of body norms such as wounds, or obesity, or deformities.

  Rozin saw an underlying theme. We hate to be reminded that we are all animals with fragile bodies that bleed, excrete, have sex, and get sick. These things remind us of death. We’re the only animals who know death is coming; disgust is one method of averting our eyes from anything that reminds us of that.

  Before humans can eat, animals and plants must die. The slaughter and rendering of animals is kept out of sight, and flank steaks, chicken parts, and spareribs appear disembodied behind glass and under plastic in supermarkets, as if by magic. In the United States, only certain kinds of animals are considered acceptable to eat: cattle, pigs, and fish, but not horses, dogs, or rats. Some organs—livers, calves’ pancreases in sweetbreads—are delicacies. Others—bladders, hearts, and brains—are repulsive. These rules vary, seemingly arbitrarily, by location and culture. In the American South, pigs’ feet are common fare; in Mexico, there’s the offal in menudo, a tripe soup; in China, almost any part of a chicken is fair game.

  In the extreme, entire nations can come to love things that repel outsiders. This makes the line between disgust and deliciousness razor-thin, moving depending on geography, climate, and culture. In Iceland, there’s a popular dish called hákarl, made from the fermented flesh of the Greenland shark, which is notorious for its foul, ammonia-tainted flavor. Hákarl has become a hard-core foodie challenge, which even celebrity chefs routinely fail. Anthony Bourdain called it “the single worst, most disgusting and terrible-tasting thing” he had ever eaten. When Andrew Zimmern, host of the Travel Channel’s Bizarre Foods, smelled it, he said he was reminded of “some of the most horrific things I’ve ever breathed in my life.” But he at least found the taste tolerable. Gordon Ramsay spit it out.

  Greenland shark meat is poisonous, a result of its peculiar physiology. Sharks filter out some wastes through muscles and skin rather than in their urine. The Greenland shark retains uncommonly high concentrations of urea, the main component of urine, and trimethylamine oxide (TMAO), a potent neurotoxin that induces a condition resembling extreme drunkenness and sometimes leads to death. During the late Middle Ages, Icelanders solved this problem by burying the meat in the sand, placing heavy stones on top to press the poisons out, and then leaving it for several months, just as the Yahgan did with their whale meat and blubber. As it froze, thawed, and refroze, Lactobacillus and Acinetobacter bacteria proliferated, producing enzymes that broke down the urea and TMAO. The smell, however, worsened because of two by-products. Urea decomposes into ammonia, and TMAO into trimethylamine, the compound that gives rotting fish its signature odor.

  Bjarnarhöfn, a remote spot on the sea near a field of magma formations, is one of a handful of places in Iceland where hákarl is made. Kristján Hildibrandsson runs an operation that processes about a hundred shark carcasses a year, and a small museum dedicated to the tradition. Hildibrandsson’s father and grandfather used to troll for sharks in a twenty-foot dory, but now they are purchased from giant trawlers at the dock. He compresses the meat in wooden crates for four to six weeks, then hangs and air-cures the mottled orange-­yellow-gray bolts of flesh in a shed behind the museum for three to five months. A potent ammonia odor cloaks the shed for a radius of about fifty feet, even in the rain. Hundreds of years ago, semirotted shark meat may have been the only thing around in wintertime to sustain Viking colonies; today, it’s eaten in bite-sized chunks with a snort of brennivín (Icelandic herbal schnapps), during Þorrablót, a midwinter festival dedicated to the Norse god Thor. Hildibrandsson invites visitors to sample small chunks of hákarl, accompanied by pieces of brown bread. “Some people like to have it right afterwards, to kill the taste,” he said helpfully. The ammonia-rot aroma hits twice—once as the fish is brought out, and again when it’s chewed—and overwhelms everything.

  The rules that govern what is disgusting and what is a delicacy have no biological rationale; they are a product of complex societies that provide a variety of foods and have the luxury of drawing such lines based on tradition. “Almost all animal products are disgusting, and they are the most nutritive of all foods,” Rozin said. “So why should you be so negative about something that is such a good package of nutrients and calories as meat is?”

  The sources of disgust are endless. Rozin found that the fear of contamination is the most persistent. Once something is seen as contaminated, it may transfer that quality to everything it comes into contact with. The impurity may be metaphorical, but to the brain, it’s quite real. Research shows that people with psychological conditions such as obsessive-­compulsive disorder have an overdeveloped sense of disgust, leading them to take repetitive steps, such as hand washing, to dispel this sense of contamination. Having developed such an avid and promiscuous disgust sense, societies had to find ways to manage it. Hebrew laws regarding kosher food, for example, explicitly define what is contaminated and what isn’t. In the Bible, God decrees that the Jews may eat only those land animals that have cloven hooves and chew cud, and only fish with scales; this excludes pigs, rabbits, and shellfish, among other things. Animals to be eaten must not be diseased, and must be ritually slaughtered by a single cut across the throat.

  Disgust is also corruptible. It can become a cultural force that divides nations and peoples. “I believe disgust is an extremely dangerous emotion,” Paul Ekman said. “It motivates genocide. When you believe people are repulsive, it dehumanizes them. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s chief propagandist, wrote that the Jewish people were like lice, a disease. Those are disgust words.”

  Consider Charles Darwin’s encounter with the Yahgan and the meat tin once again. Darwin was an archetypal humanist, seeking universal scientific explanations that transcended culture. But his reaction, and the tribesman’s, reflected the impossibility of communication between them. Each lived in a different world, his perceptions of the meat tin defined by distinct childhood experiences and the rules of his respective society. Their reactions capture an inflection point in the long arc of flavor itself, as the rising modern world and its strange food inventions encountered the vanishing natural one that had forged human tastes.

  To Darwin, the Yahgan man’s touch was akin to contamination: whatever ineffable quality made the natives dirty was transferred to the meat. The fact that this was the touch of a human, and not an animal, made it worse. “I declare the thought,” Darwin wrote in a letter to a colleague in 1862, “when I first saw in Tierra del Fuego a naked, painted, shivering, hideous savage, that my ancestors must have been somewhat similar beings, was at the time as revolting to me, nay, more revolting, than my present belief that an incomparably more remote ancestor was a hairy beast.”

  Darwin’s reaction was a product of its time. The British Empire was in ascendance, and in once remote parts of the world men with backgrounds similar to his own were encountering tribal peoples and devising ways to subdue and “civilize” them. A parallel cultural obsession of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was “wild children” who had lived all or part of their lives apart from society, scrounging for survival. They lived astride the divide between nature and civilization, and traveled back and forth across it. Wild children, to put it in twenty-first-century terminology, had food issues. Lucien Malson, a French psychologist, gathered information on fifty-three feral children over six centuries, from 1344’s “Hesse wolf-child” through 1961’s “Teheran ape-child,” identifying common themes in their stories.

  Wild children usually lived off the land, eating nearly inedible foods. An Irish “sheep-boy” found
in 1672 “was completely insensitive to the cold and would only touch grass and hay,” Malson wrote. A girl discovered in 1717 in the woods outside Zwolle in the Netherlands had been kidnapped at sixteen months old and later abandoned. “She was dressed in sacking and living on a diet of leaves and grass.” When they reentered society, their tastes appeared as alien as the Yahgans’ had to Darwin. They rejected normal foods, devoured horrifying stuff, and didn’t mind things other people find repellent, such as blood, feces, or filth. They had lived without human interaction, and thus had no behavioral immune systems or cultural cues to tell them how to react.

  The wild boy of Aveyron was the most famous of these cases. Around 1800, Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard, a young doctor, was working at the National Institution for Deaf-Mutes in Paris when a wild child arrived. Hunters had captured him naked in the woods in Lacaune, in the French Pyrenees, in 1797. He escaped, but was recaptured fifteen months later. The boy was initially diagnosed as an “idiot” with no chance of rejoining society. But Itard believed that wildness could be cured. He and the boy spent hours together as Itard attempted to socialize him. He named the boy Victor and kept a detailed record of everything they did. It was one of the earliest applications of the scientific method to psychology.

  At first, the only thing that drew Victor’s attention was food. He ignored all sounds except for the crack of a walnut being opened. He also ate acorns, potatoes, and raw chestnuts. Victor let Itard feed him warm milk and boiled potatoes. He spat out everything else. His senses were discombobulated. Sometimes he’d reach his hand into the boiling water for a potato without showing pain. Gradually, his sensibilities evolved. Within months he would eat nothing but cooked food. He took table manners to their logical extreme. Itard wrote: “The articles of food with which this child was fed, for a little time after his arrival at Paris, were shockingly disgusting. He trailed them about the room, and ate them out of his hands that were besmeared with filth. But at the period of which I am now speaking, he constantly threw away, in a pot, the contents of his plate, if any particle of dirt or dust had fallen upon it; and after he had broken his walnuts under his feet, he took pains to clean them in the nicest and most delicate manner.” Victor’s sense of disgust had become so robust, Itard wondered if he’d gone too far.

  • • •

  The tribesman squatting beside Darwin at the campfire, meanwhile, was repelled by the preserved meat’s look and clammy feel. He couldn’t tell for sure if it was food at all: it bore only a passing resemblance to animal flesh, raw or cooked. At the time, many Europeans had never seen it either, and would have reacted the same way.

  The meat tin was a new invention. In 1795, the French government, then a post-revolutionary council known as the Directory, had faced a problem. Its armies were fighting insurrectionists at home and, led by General Napoleon Bonaparte, foreign enemies in Italy and Austria. Smoking, curing, salting, and other ancient methods of preserving food had failed: convoys of rations spoiled, and entire armies starved. The Directory offered a reward to anyone who could devise a reliable method of preserving food. The effort would ultimately take fourteen years; the Directory would exist for only four.

  Nicolas Appert, a forty-five-year-old confectioner and former revolutionary who had founded a Parisian sweet shop named Fame, accepted the challenge. Working with sugar, syrups, and preserved fruits (Appert also invented peppermint schnapps for use as an ice cream topping) had showed him that some foods could last indefinitely, depending on the method of preservation. He wondered if there was a single approach that would work on everything. A well-known method for preserving wines involved heat. He started there, experimenting with different bottles, jars, and tins. He found that if he placed food in a jar; sealed it with cork, wire, and wax to make it airtight; and then heated it in water for five hours, the food was edible weeks or months later.

  This method killed the microbes that cause rot and prevented new ones from growing by cutting off the oxygen supply. Appert was unaware of this invisible process, but his approach obviously worked. Paris’s chefs loved it. No longer slaves to the seasons, now they could have whatever they wanted year-round. “The peas above all are green, tender, and more flavorful than those eaten at the height of the season,” one gastronome raved about the bottles in the Fame shopwindow. Appert packed up bottles of peas, partridges, and gravy and shipped them to the French military. Later, the navy field-tested the technique and embraced it. In 1810, then emperor Napoleon gave Appert the promised reward of 12,000 francs (about $32,000 today). Appert wrote a book, The Art of Preserving All Kinds of Animal and Vegetable Substances for Several Years, and opened a bottling factory. But bottles break. Peter Durand, an English businessman, won a patent in 1810 for a similar technique using iron cans covered with a layer of tin to prevent rust. A few years later, the British Navy adopted this method to preserve meat. By the time of the Beagle’s voyage, it was standard shipboard fare.

  The rise of canning was part of a major shift in the world’s eating habits and tastes. In a matter of decades, new technologies and farming techniques and the advent of railroads and steamships would make meat, especially beef, available to far more people than ever before. Scientists, meanwhile, began to use animal flesh as a template for experimentation in nutrition, form, and flavor.

  Justus von Liebig, a brilliant chemist and contemporary of Darwin’s born in Germany in 1803, helped bring this sea change about. Liebig performed a series of groundbreaking studies in organic chemistry, and invented nitrogen-based fertilizer after identifying the element as crucial to plant growth: agriculture was transformed. Next, Liebig turned his attention to food. His aim was to use science to manipulate nature, which he believed was highly inefficient at providing nutrition. Eventually, he hoped, new technologies would allow people to synthesize all the food they needed. He began to engineer food and formulate flavor based on scientific principles.

  Liebig theorized that the juices contain a meat’s most essential nutrients, and that searing is the best and only way to keep them from burning off. Hence the cook’s nostrum that browning meat before cooking it seals in the juices. Liebig’s idea contradicted centuries of kitchen practice—cooks tended to roast a meat some distance from the flames, then quickly brown the outside at the end—but by the mid-­nineteenth century cooks were aggressively charring it instead. Liebig turned out to be wrong. Juice isn’t that nutritious; brown meat too much and it quickly dries out. (Browning meat in moderation does make it taste better, releasing a wave of umami and Maillard chemicals; this is why it’s still standard practice.)

  Liebig’s most important achievement in this area was the invention of a new kind of food. Even before he began his career, what Appert and other food preservers were doing had been not just unprecedented but fundamentally strange. Preservation involves stopping processes, such as fermentation, that create flavor, arresting the flow of time. Liebig went a step further: he made meat even more abstract, eliminating its pesky, frightening physicality. He boiled meat down to its essence, preserved it in a cube, and used the cubes to make broth that he believed could feed the world. Liebig’s extract of meat, first developed in the 1850s and manufactured in a South American beef tallow plant, became a sensation. Liebig bouillon cubes are still manufactured in Britain. Flavor was not among their strengths; nor, despite Liebig’s ambitions, was nutrition. But like many manufactured foods today that trace their lineage back to it, its uniform blandness was predictable and reliable.

  As Darwin’s Yahgan compatriot examined this strange, squishy substance, he could have no idea that he was seeing the future of food and flavor. The civilized world had judged the process of hunting, killing, cutting up, and eating animals, which had helped mold the human body and brain, and which his tribe still practiced, to be disgusting. These practices were a mark of savagery. Now technology had invented ways to make them virtually disappear. The less people knew about where food came from, the better.

&nbs
p; CHAPTER 7

  Quest for Fire

  At the start of the twenty-first century, a coterie of amateur horticulturalists around the world began an unusual competition. Toiling in backyards, trading seeds, and seeking tips on the Internet, they pursued a goal that seemed more the domain of food science labs: cultivating the hottest chili pepper in the world. They were trying to dethrone the Guinness Book of World Records champion since 1994, the Red Savina, a smooth-skinned chili about the size of a Ping-Pong ball, and two hundred times as hot as a jalapeño.

  For growing numbers of enthusiasts, sampling the superhot burn of such chilies was both an exercise in culinary appreciation and a test of mettle. The gardeners believed that the potential of chili heat had barely been tapped. To unlock it, they cross-pollinated existing hot pepper plants or grafted one onto another, hoping to get offspring consistently hotter than either parent. To enhance pungency, some exposed their plants to heat lamps and underwatered them. Prospective record-setting chilies were sent to labs that assessed their concentrations of capsaicin, the chemical responsible for the burning sensation. The goal was to surpass the Red Savina’s rating of 577,000 Scoville heat units, the scale that measures hotness.

  There were setbacks. In 2006, the Red Savina, a strain of habanero, was finally beaten by farmers in India. Guinness named a new record-holder, the Bhut Jolokia, commonly known as the “ghost pepper” for its pale, milky color. It had grown widely for decades in northeastern India’s Assam region. Its hotness hovered around 1 million Scoville units. But the hobbyists persisted, and soon they had a series of breakthroughs. In 2010 and 2011, the Guinness title changed hands three times in four months.