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Stiff. Spook. Bonk. If you’re a fan of Mary Roach, “America’s funniest science writer,” you’ll recognize the titles of her three popular non-fiction works exploring death, the paranormal, and sex. Roach’s latest book, Gulp., shares not only the catchy one-word title but also her witty, often irreverent tone as she takes the reader through “adventures on the alimentary canal.”
Included are chapters on the nose’s role in taste, what the “Fletcherizing” movement was all about (chewing food to liquid form), spit (stimulated and unstimulated), flatus (gas), what a “prison wallet” is (imagine what body part is used for smuggling valuables into the clink, and you’ve figured that one out), why competitive eaters’ stomachs don’t burst, whether or not one could truly survive in the belly of a whale, and the possibility that Elvis’s megacolon caused his death, among so many other fascinating themes.
Roach (right) obviously conducted a great deal of research for the book, interviewing spit and gas experts in Europe, for example, and looking through the history of medical science to do what she does best: inform and entertain the reader about universal and often taboo topics. Why Gulp.’s topic? Roach explains in her introduction: “When it comes to literature about eating, science has been a little hard to hear amid the clamor of cuisine.” By the end of the book, Roach’s voice has been loudly heard, and since she ends the book with the final stop on the alimentary canal, cuisine is the last thing on one’s mind.
Gulp. is as much a profile of the people who work in food-related jobs as it is a portrait of the alimentary canal and what happens to food once we eat it. Throughout Roach’s adventures, she introduces the reader to a number of experts who share one quality—passion bordering on obsession—despite often working in fringe research. There’s Deanna Pucciarelli, the director of Hospitality and Food Management at, fittingly, Ball State University, who hopes to make pork testicles more palatable to the public and Jianshe Chen, an oral processing (chewing) expert at the University of Leeds, who believes people like crunchy food because it acts as a de-stresser, much like punching and kicking.
Roach exploits every possibility to gross out the reader while packing the book with fun facts—cats don’t taste sweet; sticky rice mochi is one of the deadliest foods around; laundry detergent acts like a digestive tract; bloated, gas-filled prey corpses inside snakes may have led to the belief in fire-breathing dragons; healthy adults create new stomach linings every three days; and floaters float (conjures memories of the pool scene in Caddyshack, at right) because of trapped methane gas, not fiber.
Amidst the fun, however, the author also subtly reveals how the shame and disgust attached to talking about certain parts of our body and their functions is as backward as some of the early medical procedures recounted in the book. Fecal transplants, for example, have been proven to provide relief to patients with C. diff (an intestinal bacterium), with positive implications for those suffering from colitis and Crohn’s disease, but due to the “ick factor” involved with the procedure, its acceptance and funding are currently limited.
At the end of the book, Roach reflects on a recent colonoscopy she underwent without drugs, an experience that evoked a “ mix of wonder, privilege, [and] humility” as well as the question: “How is it that we find Christina Aguilera more interesting than the inside of our own bodies?” Indeed.
Gulp. will be released on April 1, no joke.
