A Natural History of the Senses (25 page)

For the truffle farmer and his sow, walking above a subterranean orchard of truffles, it must be hysterically funny and sad. Here this beautiful, healthy sow smells the sexiest boar she’s ever encountered in her life, only for some reason he seems to be underground. This
drives her wild and she digs frantically, only to turn up a strange, lumpy, splotched mushroom. Then she smells another supermacho boar only a few feet away—also buried underground—and dives in, trying desperately to dig up that one. It must make her berserk with desire and frustration. Finally, the truffle farmer gathers the mushrooms, puts them in his sack, and drags his sow back home, though behind her the whole orchard vibrates with the rich aromatic lust of handsome boars, every one of them panting for her, but invisible!

On a voyage to the Antarctic in tempestuous waters, I become seasick and crawl into my cabin for a rest. But my cabin is aft and high on the cruise ship, and rolls far around the moment arm of the ship, then leaps up with each wave and crashes down, rolls and leaps again, occasionally throwing in a shimmy for good measure. Unscrewing a small jar of stubby brown knots, I roll one out, place it in my mouth, suck on it to soften it, then methodically begin to chew as a pleasant searing oozes over my tongue. Ginger has a long history of medicinal use in China, where they drink ginger tea for colds, flu, and other ailments. Chinese fishermen chew on ginger root to prevent seasickness.

Over the past few years, researchers around the world have been testing ginger’s folkloric reputation, and have found this knotty root to live up to its legend. Researchers in Japan discovered that ginger is indeed a good cough suppressant; furthermore, it acts as an analgesic, lowers temperature, stimulates the immune system, and calms the heart in general, while at the same time strengthening the beating of the atrium, just as digitalis does. Nigerian scientists found that it acts as an antioxidant, and can kill salmonella. In California, scientists discovered that it works as a potent meat tenderizer and preserver, In a joint study at Brigham Young University in Utah and Mount Union College in Ohio, researchers learned that ginger acts better than Dramamine to keep motion sickness at bay. In Denmark, experiments showed that ginger keeps the blood from forming clots. In India, they discovered that ginger lowers cholesterol.

With all the edicts about what to eat when and what to avoid, it sometimes feels as if we’re medicating ourselves rather than dining. Aluminum pots are out, since microscopic particles of aluminum can get into the food, and aluminum has been implicated in Alzheimer’s disease. Butter, cream, and saturated fats are out, since they can lead to heart disease. Fiber is in, since it can help prevent rectal cancer, but not too much fiber, which can be equally damaging. Green, leafy vegetables are in for their antioxidant effect—but not if you’re on a blood thinner, because they contain vitamin K, which clots blood. Fish oils are in, because they’re important for the heart, but fish are often found to contain pollutants. Fresh fruit is important for its vitamin C, fiber, and other elements, although frequently sprayed with insecticide that’s carcinogenic. Beef is out because of its high fat content, which has been implicated in everything from polyps to breast cancer, and, anyway, grilling meat produces carcinogens. Poultry is often fed hormones that aren’t good for us, and frequently contains salmonella. Shellfish, as a light low-fat source of protein, is all right, but one must be careful to order oysters that haven’t come from polluted harbors; and is it really safe to eat lobster and shrimp, both high in cholesterol, which are scavengers, i.e., creatures who eat the putrid remains of other creatures? In this morass of paradoxes, how on earth can one guiltlessly consider taste?

As a culture, we are mesmerized by the idea of the medicinal quality of food, swearing by yogurt, bean curd, carrot juice, ginseng root, raw honey, and many other items as they drift in and out of fashion. We forget that, in our not-too-distant past, the landscape was our pharmacy; it still is for many native peoples, as well as for the most sophisticated drug companies, who continue to send people into the rain forests to gather leaves for all manner of drugs. “Tell me what you eat, and I shall tell you what you are,” Brillat-Savarin once said, but we understand his maxim in a broader sense than he did, picturing all the vitamins that heal, proteins that strengthen, fibers that scour and protect, carbohydrates that calm, sugars that energize. Children of the industrial age, we still think of eating as fueling our bodies, stoking the tiny furnace in each cell. We picture our body as a factory, and sometimes even use that word when we
talk about its processes. Many of our creations resemble us. For a while, neurologists railed against comparing the brain to a computer, because it seemed terrifyingly automatic, amoral, and mechanistic. Now the computer simile is back in vogue, because the similarities are so obvious as to be undeniable. The brain is the computer; religion, prejudice, bias, and so forth are all software. The neurologists haven’t become more coldblooded all of a sudden; computers have just become more familiar and less frightening entities. Yes, we say, brains that needed to store more information than they could hold invented artificial brains that merely reproduced the filing system that was familiar to them. No surprise in that. When we wished to create energy outside of our bodies, we also copied the only model we knew: You put fuel into something and it empowers it for a while, excretes wastes, and needs to be fed again to do more work. What great analogizers we are. It’s part of our greatest charm as a species that we can look at the footprint of an elephant in the dried mud beside a waterhole, see how its steep sides trap water, and say: I could use one of those to carry liquids. In
Henry IV, Part II
, Shakespeare has Falstaff say that the body serves as our model of society as well, that the body has its own politics and classes. But analogies can run both ways, like an alternating current. Not only do we create mechanical powerhouses on the principle of the body, we eat candy bars called Powerhouse to power our body. And, whatever our age, we all eat some foods we secretly detest, because we suspect they’re therapeutic. We prescribe foods: “Eat your broccoli,” we insist, thinking of its gifts of vitamins and fiber, not that it looks like a small forest floating in the pot. “It’s good for you.”

In a small bedside bookcase, I often keep bare-bones survival texts like
A Pilot’s Survival Manual
, from which one learns the correct side of a nomad’s tent to enter after crash-landing in the Gobi
Desert, or Bradford Angier’s
How To Stay Alive in the Woods
, with this recipe for moose soup made in a hole in the ground:

Indeed, why not? I particularly like the recipe’s opening:
You’ve just killed a moose
. It reminds me of a recipe I once read for stir-fried dog, which began:
First clean and eviscerate a healthy puppy
. If, like me, you try not to eat mammals unless pressed by an unknowing host or necessity (a knowing host), neither dish will make your mouth water. But I like the idea of quietly brewing moose soup in a mossy pit. This book assumes that though clothed, armed, and equipped with a compass, one may have forgotten matches. Cooking, while not essential to survival, certainly makes it easier, so there are many plans for starting a fire with water (used as a magnifier), watches (hold “the crystals from two watches or pocket compasses of about the same size back to back …”), a drill made out of a bow, sparking a hunting knife against flint and other paraphernalia, including a gun.
*

Think what the survival manuals for space travel will include! Much of the pleasure of taste is smell; we can smell something only when it evaporates. So, I imagine there are fewer scents in weightlessness. And that would mean food wouldn’t taste as good. Nonetheless, competition is keen to cater the Soviet and American space shuttles. One likely supplier for the next Soviet shuttle is Belème, a company jointly owned by a French astronaut, a biologist who studies weightlessness, and the chef and owner of L’Espérance, a three-star Michelin
restaurant near Paris. The orbital menu would include such
haute
delicacies as artichoke chips and
poulet à la Dijonnaise
, presented in tubes and cans. Belème already supplies polar and desert explorers, mountain climbers, racing-car drivers, and other gastronomically aware adventurers with gourmet foods appropriate to the environment they’ll be in. When we think of cuisines, we picture steaming plates of curry, crawfish, peanut soup, chili, fettuccine, or some other savory dialect. But there is also, in its infancy, a space cuisine. I’ve eaten NASA’s freeze-dried space peaches, which taste like sweetly citric wasp’s nest, and read astronauts’ accounts of other foods; space cuisine is nothing to write home about. But wonder flavors things better than any condiment, so for short hauls freeze-dried fare may do just fine, until space travel is no stranger than a stroll along the Rialto in Venice, and we dare to dine al fresco at a cozy little spot whose menu offers moon on the half shell and a side order of stars.

A nation of sensation-addicts might dine as chic urbanites do, on rhubarb and raspberry tortes, smoked lobster, and hibiscus-wrapped monkfish, wiped with raspberry butter, baked in a clay oven, and then elevated briefly in mesquite smoke. When I was in college, I didn’t eat goldfish or cram into Volkswagens, or chug whole bottles of vodka, but others did, in a neo-Roaring Twenties ennui. Shocking the bourgeoisie has always been the unstated encyclical of college students and artists, and sometimes that includes grossing out society in a display of bizarre eating habits. One of the classic
Monty Python’s Flying Circus
sketches shows a chocolate manufacturer being cross-examined by policemen for selling chocolate-covered baby frogs, bones and all (“without the bones, they wouldn’t be crunchy!” he whines), as well as insects, and other taboo animals sure to appal western taste buds. I’ve met field scientists of many persuasions who have eaten native foods like grasshoppers, leeches, or bats stewed in coconut milk, in part to be mannerly, in part out of curiosity, and I think in part to provide a good anecdote when they
returned to the States. However, these are just nutritious foods that fall beyond our usual sphere of habit and custom.

We don’t always eat foods for their taste, but sometimes for their feel. I once ate a popular duck dish in Amazonian Brazil,
pato no tucupí
(Portuguese for
pato
, “duck” +
no
, “within” +
tucupí
, “extracted juice of manioc”) whose main attraction is that it’s anesthetic: It makes your mouth as tingly numb as Benzedrine. The numbing ingredient is
jambu
(in Latin,
Spilanthes
), a yellow daisy that grows throughout Brazil and is sometimes used as a cold remedy. The effect was startling—it was as if my lips and whole mouth were vibrating. But many cultures have physically startling foods. I adore hot peppers and other spicy foods, ones that sandblast the mouth. We say “taste,” when we describe such a food to someone else, but what we’re really talking about is a combination of touch, taste, and the absence of discomfort when the deadening or sandblasting finally stops. The thinnest line divides Szechwan hot-pepper sauce from being thrilling (causing your lips to tingle even after the meal is over), and being sulfurically hot enough to cause a gag response as you eat it.
*
A less extreme example is our liking for crunchy or crisp foods, like carrots, which have little taste but lots of noise and mouth action. One of the most successful foods on earth is Coca-Cola, a combination of intense sweetness, caffeine, and a prickly feeling against the nose that we find refreshing. It was first marketed as a mouthwash in 1888, and at that time contained cocaine, a serious refresher—an ingredient that was dropped in 1903. It is still flavored with extract of coca leaves, but minus the cocaine. Coffee, tea, tobacco, and other stimulants all came into use in the western world in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and quickly percolated around Europe. Fashionable and addictive, they offered diners a real nervous-system jolt, either of narcotic calm or caffeine rush, and, unlike normal foods, they could be taken in doses, depending on how high one wished to get or how addicted one already was.

In Japan, specially licensed chefs prepare the rarest sashimi delicacy: the white flesh of the puffer fish, served raw and arranged in elaborate floral patterns on a platter. Diners pay large sums of money for the carefully prepared dish, which has a light, faintly sweet taste, like raw pompano. It had better be carefully prepared, because, unlike pompano, puffer fish is ferociously poisonous. You wouldn’t think a puffer fish would need such chemical armor, since its main form of defense is to swallow great gulps of water and become so bloated it is too large for most predators to swallow. And yet its skin, ovaries, liver, and intestines contain tetrodotoxin, one of the most poisonous chemicals in the world, hundreds of times more lethal than strychnine or cyanide. A shred small enough to fit under one’s fingernail could kill an entire family. Unless the poison is completely removed by a deft, experienced chef, the diner will die midmeal. That’s the appeal of the dish: eating the possibility of death, a fright your lips spell out as you dine. Yet preparing it is a traditional art form in Japan, with widespread aficionados. The most highly respected
fugu
chefs are the ones who manage to leave in the barest touch of the poison, just enough for the diner’s lips to tingle from his brush with mortality but not enough to actually kill him. Of course, a certain number of diners do die every year from eating
fugu
, but that doesn’t stop intrepid
fugu
-fanciers. The ultimate
fugu
connoisseur orders
chiri
, puffer flesh lightly cooked in a broth made of the poisonous livers and intestines. It’s not that diners don’t understand the bizarre danger of puffer-fish toxin. Ancient Egyptian, Chinese, Japanese, and other cultures all describe
fugu
poisoning in excruciating detail: It first produces dizziness, numbness of the mouth and lips, breathing trouble, cramps, blue lips, a desperate itchiness as of insects crawling all over one’s body, vomiting, dilated pupils, and then a zombielike sleep, really a kind of neurological paralysis during which the victims are often aware of what’s going on around them, and from which they die. But sometimes they wake. If a Japanese man or woman dies of
fugu
poison, the family waits a few days before burying them, just in case they wake up. Every now and then someone poisoned by
fugu
is nearly buried alive, coming to at the last moment to describe in horrifying detail their
own funeral and burial, during which, although they desperately tried to cry out or signal that they were still alive, they simply couldn’t move.