Chapter 5 — The Anthropology of the Strange

"There is no such thing as absolute dirt: it exists in the eye of the beholder." — Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (1966)

E very food in the four chapters behind us was introduced against an invisible companion: a reader assumed to be flinching. The Icelander's cured shark, the Oaxacan's toasted grasshopper, the Sardinian's living cheese — each arrived on the page trailing the words "extreme," "daring," "not for the faint-hearted," and each of those words describes not the food but a spectator. It is time to examine the spectator, because the most interesting question this volume can ask is not why some people eat sheep's-milk cheese threaded with fly larvae, but why some other people, offered the same spoonful, produce a facial expression — the wrinkled nose, the drawn-back upper lip, the tongue already moving to expel — that is identical in Reykjavík, Lagos and Osaka, and that they are entirely certain is a report on the cheese rather than on themselves. Disgust feels like knowledge. It presents itself as a fact discovered in the object, as self-evident as its coldness or its weight. The argument of this chapter, which is the argument at the centre of the whole volume, is that it is very largely a fact manufactured by the culture of the person feeling it, and that "edible" — a word we use as though it named a property of matter, like solubility or mass — is instead, and much more nearly, a property of people.

The Naturalist's Grimace

The scientific study of disgust has a founder, and he is the presiding spirit of half of this volume: Charles Darwin. Thirteen years after the Origin, in 1872, he published The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, the book that first proposed to treat the passions as evolved traits with a natural history of their own, and he gave disgust its earliest careful description. He began exactly where this chapter began, at the mouth. "The term 'disgust,'" he wrote, "in its simplest sense, means something offensive to the taste" — and then, with the field naturalist's incorrigible eye for the awkward particular, he told a story against himself. "In Tierra del Fuego a native touched with his finger some cold preserved meat which I was eating at our bivouac, and plainly showed utter disgust at its softness; whilst I felt utter disgust at my food being touched by a naked savage, though his hands did not appear dirty."

Read that twice, because the whole discipline is folded inside it. Two men at a campfire at the cold end of the world, and a single act of contact produces two revulsions pointing in opposite directions — the Fuegian appalled by the clammy softness of the tinned meat, the Englishman appalled that a hand not his own has grazed his supper — and each of them experiences his own recoil as a plain fact about the food, when it is nothing of the kind. Neither meat nor hand has changed; only the meaning laid over it, and the meanings are contradictory. Darwin even caught the emotion's most telling property, that it answers to an idea rather than to a chemistry: he observed that the revolt of the stomach can be provoked "by the mere idea of having partaken of any unusual food, as of an animal which is not commonly eaten; although there is nothing in such food to cause the stomach to reject it." The stomach turns over at a thought. That single sentence, written a century before the laboratories confirmed it, is the thesis of this chapter: disgust is a verdict on significance, not on substance.

Darwin was as precise about the grimace itself as about its cause. He anatomised the face of disgust — the upper lip "strongly retracted," the wrinkled sides of the nose, the lower lip "protruded and everted as much as possible," the guttural ach or ugh — and he argued that this expression is common to all mankind. He was right, and the confirmation, when it came, closed a satisfying circle: a century later the psychologist Paul Ekman carried standardised photographs of facial expressions to peoples who had never seen a European face, among them the preliterate Fore of the New Guinea highlands whom the next section of this chapter will have grim reason to revisit, and found disgust to be one of a small handful of expressions read the same way on every continent. The grimace the chapter opened with, the one identical in Reykjavík and Lagos and Osaka, is real, and ancient, and human to the species. It is only the thing it points at that each culture supplies for itself.

Between Darwin and the modern laboratory stands one transitional figure who deserves his name in the record: the psychologist Andras Angyal, who in a 1941 paper titled simply "Disgust and related aversions" made the first move toward a testable theory. Angyal noticed that the emotion clusters, with a suspicious tidiness, around a single class of objects — the waste products of the animal body — and he proposed that its real concern is not the poisonous but the degraded, a horror of contact with the low and the decayed rather than a calculation of toxicity. It was Angyal's suggestion, that the mouth is being guarded against symbolic debasement and not merely against harm, that the next generation of psychologists would take up and test until it broke open into something far stranger than he had guessed.

The Emotion in the Mouth

The modern laboratory study of disgust comes of age, as so much of this volume's psychology does, with a definition careful enough to be tested. In 1987 the University of Pennsylvania psychologist Paul Rozin and his colleague April Fallon published a paper in Psychological Review under the deceptively plain title "A perspective on disgust," and in it they approached the emotion, before anything else, as a problem of eating. They defined disgust as "revulsion at the prospect of oral incorporation of offensive objects" — a sentence that repays slow reading, because every term in it is load-bearing. The revulsion is anticipatory: it fires at the prospect, before the thing is anywhere near the throat, which is the whole purpose of a system built to keep poison and pestilence on the far side of the lips. The incorporation is oral: the mouth is the disputed frontier, the customs post between the world and the self, and disgust is the guard posted at it. And the offending objects are offensive in a peculiar way — they carry what Rozin and Fallon called contamination. A contaminant is a thing that, by even the briefest contact, renders an otherwise acceptable food unacceptable: a single hair, a single fly, and the whole plate is spoiled, not reduced by one hair's worth but ruined entire. That is not a nutritional calculation. It is something much closer to a magical one.

Rozin was bold enough to say exactly that, and ingenious enough to prove it. In a set of experiments published in 1986 with Linda Millman and Carol Nemeroff, he showed that two principles which anthropologists had catalogued a century earlier in the "magical" thought of traditional societies — the folklorist James Frazer and the sociologist Marcel Mauss had named them the laws of sympathetic magic — operate, unacknowledged, in the educated modern Westerner who believes himself to have left all magic behind. The first is the law of contagion: once in contact, always in contact. A sterilised, dead cockroach was dropped into a glass of juice and then lifted out again; the juice, now demonstrably as clean as it had been a moment earlier, had become undrinkable to almost everyone, its contamination outliving both the removal of its cause and the assurance of a chemist that nothing remained. The second is the law of similarity: the image is the object. A food moulded into the shape of something offensive was refused by people who knew perfectly well what it was and what it was not; the appearance had become, for the purposes of the mouth, the reality. Not one of the adults tested proved immune, and Rozin liked to observe that these were not children but grown, schooled, rational Americans. In the vicinity of the disgusting, we are all sympathetic magicians.

Contagion does not stop at the insect in the glass; Rozin and Carol Nemeroff followed it out of the kitchen and into the moral world, and found it fully at work there too. In a study reported in 1994 they asked people whether they would put on a soft, laundered, entirely clean woollen jumper — and then added that it had once been worn, briefly, by someone else. If that someone had suffered a misfortune, or carried a disease, the enthusiasm drained; if the previous wearer had been a convicted murderer, most recoiled; and a garment said to have belonged to Adolf Hitler was, for a large majority, simply unwearable, as though evil were a stain that laundering could not reach. Nothing whatever had touched the wool but a name. Yet the aversion was as real as the one produced by the cockroach, and it points to the same buried conviction — that an essence can pass by contact and lodge in matter, immune to soap and to reason alike. The frontier the mouth guards, it turns out, is patrolled by the same instinct that guards the whole self, and the contaminant it fears is not only the germ but the taint.

Contamination points, in the end, in a single unexpected direction, and Rozin and Fallon followed it to its root: the belief, older than agriculture and present in some form on every inhabited continent, that one takes on the properties of what one eats. "You are what you eat," we say, and take it for dietary advice; the phrase is in truth the fossil of a far more literal conviction — that the timid man who eats the flesh of a lion grows brave, that the person who swallows something disgusting is himself, in some ineradicable degree, made disgusting. The French sociologist Claude Fischler gave this its modern name in an influential essay of 1988, "Food, self and identity," calling it the principle of incorporation: to eat a thing is to make it part of oneself, body and — the eater half-believes — nature too, so that the act of swallowing is never nutritionally innocent but always an admission of the eaten into the identity of the eater. This is why the emotion refuses to stay in the kitchen. Rozin, later working with the psychologists Jonathan Haidt and Clark McCauley, traced how the same revulsion that begins as core disgust — the rejection of certain foods, bodily products and animals — reaches outward until it polices conduct, so that we call a cruel act "sickening," a corrupt man "nauseating," a betrayal something that "turns the stomach." The language of the mouth is conscripted wholesale for the language of conscience. It matters for this volume that a food taboo should feel like a moral law, because in the machinery of the mind it is very nearly built from the same part.

There is, folded inside all this, an explanation of the daring palate itself — of the whole tradition this volume has been chronicling. Rozin's earliest work, in a landmark 1976 essay on how rats, humans and other omnivores select their food, named the predicament that any creature built to eat everything must live inside, and he called it the omnivore's paradox. The specialist is spared it: the koala, committed to eucalyptus, need never wonder what to put in its mouth. But the omnivore, able to digest almost anything, is condemned to choose, and is therefore pulled in two directions at once — toward neophilia, the appetite for the new food that might be the next staple, and toward neophobia, the fear of the new food that might be the last meal. Every human eater is a compromise struck somewhere along that line, and a culture's cuisine is in part a treaty settling where the compromise falls. What this volume has been calling the curious palate is simply a person who has let neophilia run a little ahead of neophobia — who has decided that the balance the timid strike is set too far toward fear — and the anthropology of this chapter is, at bottom, the study of the fear he has decided to master.

From the Stomach to the Conscience

That the language of nausea should be lent to the language of morals is not a quirk of English; it is a structural fact about the mind, and following it exposes something this volume needs the reader to see clearly before the ethics of the next chapter can do their work. Rozin, with Laura Lowery, Sumio Imada and Jonathan Haidt, set it out in 1999 as what they called the CAD triad: three moral emotions — contempt, anger and disgust — each standing guard over a different kind of rule. Anger answers to violations against persons and their rights; contempt to failures of community and hierarchy; and disgust, the oldest and most bodily of the three, to violations of what they termed divinity — offences against purity, against the sense that the human body and its conduct ought to be kept above the merely animal. The revulsion first built to keep rot out of the mouth was, over the long history of the species, seconded to keep a certain idea of degradation out of the soul. When we say that a betrayal is sickening, we are not speaking in metaphor so much as reporting, faithfully, which alarm has gone off.

This has a consequence that Jonathan Haidt made famous, and it is the most important thing in this section. In a much-discussed paper of 2001, "The emotional dog and its rational tail," Haidt argued that in matters of morality the feeling arrives first and the reasons come running afterward, sent to justify a verdict the gut has already delivered — the reasoning is the tail, wagged by the intuitive dog, and not the other way about. His demonstration was a small story he asked people to judge: a brother and sister, adult, on holiday, who decide once, carefully, using two forms of contraception, and telling no one, to make love, find that it draws them closer, and never do it again. Almost everyone declares it wrong; and then, pressed for a reason, reaches for harm — inbreeding, someone hurt, the family damaged — and is met, one by one, with the story's careful defences, until the reasons are exhausted and the person arrives at a state Haidt named moral dumbfounding: "I don't know, I can't explain it, I just know it's wrong." The judgment stands with all its supports knocked away, because it never rested on the supports. It rested on disgust. For a volume whose whole subject is the line between the eaten and the forbidden, this is the finding that changes everything: "it is disgusting" carries the full felt authority of "it is wrong," and feels every bit as much like the discovery of a fact — and it is, we have just seen, frequently a report on nothing but the eye of the beholder. A verdict that can survive the defeat of all its reasons is not a verdict a careful eater can afford to trust about the tortoise, the songbird and the whale. Something better will have to be built, and built on purpose.

Learned, or Built In?

An honest chapter must now admit a real scientific quarrel, because the argument so far — that disgust is very largely written by culture — has a serious and well-armed opponent, and the volume's rule of honesty forbids hiding it. A school of researchers led by the London hygiene scientist Valerie Curtis has argued that disgust is, at root, not learned at all but evolved: a behavioural immune system, a first line of defence that keeps the body away from the sources of infectious disease before any germ is contracted. The evidence is not trivial. In 2004, with Robert Aunger and Tamer Rabie, Curtis published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society the results of a survey carried out through the BBC's website, in which some forty thousand people from every region of the world rated a series of images for disgustingness. The pattern was strikingly consistent and strikingly diagnostic. Images that carried a genuine disease cue — a bodily fluid, a louse, a wound, a plate of something rotting — were reliably rated more disgusting than closely matched images with no such cue; women, who across the long human past carried the greater share of both pregnancy and child-rearing, reported higher disgust sensitivity than men; sensitivity declined steadily with age, tracking the fall in reproductive stakes; and a stranger's bodily fluids were rated fouler than the identical fluids of one's own family, exactly as a pathogen-avoidance system tuned to unfamiliar sources ought to predict. None of that looks like a lesson taught at the family table. It looks like an inheritance.

The resolution — and it is a genuine resolution, not a fudge — is that the two accounts are quarrelling over different halves of the same thing. Evolution supplies the machine: a universal readiness to be disgusted, a facial expression drawn from one template the world over, and a rough standing list of the usual suspects — corpses, oozing wounds, vermin, decay — that no culture has to teach because the body arrives expecting them. But evolution leaves the roster radically open, and that is where culture does its work. It is culture, not the pathogen, that decides that this particular controlled rot is Roquefort and that one is an abomination, that these six-legged creatures are lunch and those are filth, that the flesh of this animal is meat and that one is unthinkable — filling in, with the specific and contradictory content of a thousand different cuisines, a form that biology has merely roughed out. Nature builds the alarm and stocks it with a few default triggers; culture wires in almost everything that actually makes it ring. The disease-avoidance theorists are right that the emotion is old and adaptive and shared; the anthropologists are right that what a given people finds disgusting is, in the overwhelming main, its own local invention. The daring palate is not a person born without the alarm. It is a person who has examined what trips his, and found most of the wiring to be the work of human hands.

Matter Out of Place

If the psychologist explains the force of disgust, the anthropologist explains its map — why a given people draws the line here rather than there. The indispensable text is Mary Douglas's Purity and Danger of 1966, one of the few works of social anthropology a cook ought to read from cover to cover. Douglas began with a deflating observation about dirt. There is no such thing as absolute dirt, she wrote; it exists in the eye of the beholder. Shoes are not dirty in themselves, yet it is dirty to set them on the dining table; food is not dirty in itself, yet a smear of it on a pillow is filth. Dirt is simply matter out of place — and where there is dirt there is a system, because "out of place" presupposes a scheme of places, a classification of the world into which most things fit and against which a residue offends. Dirt is the by-product of order. A people's disgust is the shadow thrown by its sense of how the world is properly arranged.

From this Douglas drew the audacious reading for which the book is famous: her account of the dietary laws of Leviticus, the long catalogue of creatures the ancient Israelites were forbidden to eat. Earlier writers had explained the prohibitions as primitive hygiene — the pig carries disease — or as arbitrary tests of obedience. Douglas proposed instead that they were a classification made visible on the plate. The cosmos of Leviticus assigned to each realm its proper form: the beasts of the land should be cloven-hoofed animals that chew the cud, the creatures of the water should have fins and scales, and whatever straddled those categories was anomalous, and the anomalous was unclean. The pig, which has the cloven hoof but does not chew the cud, fell between the classes; the shellfish, which lives in the water but neither swims nor bears scales, fell between them too; the things that "swarm" belonged to no clean order at all. Holiness, in her reading, meant wholeness — keeping the kinds of creation distinct — and to eat across the boundaries was to eat disorder itself. The forbidden foods were forbidden not because they were dangerous but because they did not fit.

It is a beautiful theory, and it has never wanted for rivals. The most formidable came from the American anthropologist Marvin Harris, the champion of the school called cultural materialism, who in Good to Eat of 1985 (reissued as The Sacred Cow and the Abominable Pig) turned Douglas's argument on its head. Where she read the forbidden pig as a symbol out of place, Harris read it as an entry in an account book. The pig, he pointed out, is a woodland animal of shade and wallow, wretchedly suited to the hot, treeless, arid lands of the ancient Near East; it gives no milk, no wool and no labour, cannot be herded across dry distances, and eats the very grain its keepers need for themselves — a luxury converter of food into food, ruinous to run in that particular ecology. The taboo, on his reading, is an ecological verdict wearing the robes of a divine one, a hard economic truth encoded as a sacred law so that it would be obeyed without argument down the generations. The same logic explained his other title case, the sacred cow of India: an animal worth vastly more alive, as a giver of milk, of fuel and fertiliser, and of the traction that ploughs the subcontinent, than it could ever be worth as a single meal of beef, its inviolability a rational refusal to eat the tractor. Structuralist and materialist have contended over the abominable pig for half a century, and this volume is in no position to award the verdict; the point worth carrying forward is that the deepest students of taboo cannot agree whether its taproot is meaning or economics — which should make any diner slow to trust that his own certainties about food rest on anything so solid as a fact.

It is a further mark of that difficulty, and this volume is bound by its own rules of honesty to report it, that the author of the most famous theory of all came to distrust her own. In a preface written for a reissue of Purity and Danger in 2002, Douglas disowned precisely the Leviticus reading, calling her original explanation of the dietary laws "a major mistake," and offered a wholly different account — that the abominable animals were, if anything, protected rather than despised, spared the plate because the dietary code modelled the body and the altar upon one another, so that a creature unfit for sacrifice was one it was abominable to harm. The point, for us, is not which reading is correct but the honesty of the reversal. Even the thinker who taught a century of readers to see taboo as a hidden system spent her last decades arguing with herself about the particular system, and a naturalist who trots out the pig of Leviticus as a tidy illustration should know that Douglas herself, thirty-six years on, would have taken him gently by the sleeve and stopped him.

The Raw and the Cooked

Where Douglas mapped the line, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss asked what the drawing of any such line is for, and returned the answer that has organised the subject ever since: cooking is the act by which a species announces that it has left nature and joined culture. In the first volume of his Mythologiques, Le Cru et le Cuit — The Raw and the Cooked — of 1964, and in a shorter essay of the year following, he set every cuisine on what he called the culinary triangle, whose three corners are the raw, the cooked and the rotten. The raw is the unworked given, matter as nature hands it over. From that corner a foodstuff may travel two ways. It can be cooked — transformed by fire, by tools, by deliberate human intention — which is a cultural passage, the signature of the kitchen and so of humanity itself; no society has ever been found that takes all its food raw, and the mastery of fire is about as close to a universal human threshold as the discipline possesses. Or it can be left to rot — transformed by time and microbe, a passage worked by nature without us. Cooked and rotten are both departures from the raw; the whole difference lies in whose hand does the transforming.

The quiet brilliance of the scheme is that the border between the cultural transformation and the natural one is itself drawn by culture, and drawn differently everywhere. For the same West that is so certain the fermented shark of Chapter Three is decay, and therefore an ordeal, keeps a vast and beloved larder of its own controlled rot and files it under delicacy. Cheese is milk deliberately soured and colonised by mould and bacteria, held at the exact edge of putrefaction where a Frenchman finds paradise and calls the smell "ripe"; a blue cheese is, by any dispassionate description, spoiled milk veined with the blue-green threads of penicillium, and it is eaten with reverence. Wine is grape juice whose sugars have been devoured by yeast — rot, arrested and flattered into virtue. Bread, yoghurt, vinegar, soy sauce, cured ham, and the very umami that Volume One gave a whole chapter to praising, are all the labour of the rotten corner of the triangle, invited across the line and reclassified, by nothing sturdier than familiarity, as culture rather than nature. The surströmming that appals the Parisian and the Roquefort that appals the Tokyoite are the identical human trick performed with different microbes. What divides the delicacy from the disgusting is not the chemistry of decay but the accident of whose grandmother first made it, and handed it down, and called it good.

This is the mirror the chapter has been turning slowly toward the reader, and it is worth holding still. The Englishman who cannot conceive of eating a dog eats without a flicker the lamb whose eyes are, to a Hindu neighbour, no less the housing of a soul. The Frenchman who relishes horse is watched across the Channel with the very revulsion he reserves for the Englishman who boils good mint into sludge to pour over it. Blood is nourishment in a Scottish black pudding and a Maasai gourd, and pollution in a kosher or a halal kitchen. The insect that turns the stomach of Chapter Four's Western reader is, to some two billion people, simply lunch — and it is the West's aversion, young and local and bound up with a particular history of settled agriculture and the association of insects with the swarming and the spoiled, that is the parochial thing crying out for explanation, not the appetite of the human majority. Every reader of this volume carries, without a shred of embarrassment, a private catalogue of foods he calls disgusting that someone he would readily recognise as civilised calls dinner. The line is real. It is simply his, and not the world's.

And the lines are not fixed monuments; they drift, and now and then they harden suddenly into law. Within living memory the dog was food in Korea, its meat a summer dish of long tradition; and yet in January 2024 the South Korean National Assembly voted — by two hundred and eight votes to nil — to abolish the breeding and slaughter of dogs for meat altogether by 2027, a taboo one could watch crystallising in real time, the boundary of the edible moving across a single generation for reasons of sentiment rather than of safety. At the far end of every such map lies the one prohibition that comes nearest to a true human universal, the eating of other human beings — and even that, examined closely, refuses to behave like a fact of nature rather than a fact of culture. For the Fore people of the New Guinea highlands, whom this chapter has already met through Ekman's photographs, the consuming of the bodies of dead kin was not an atrocity but a tenderness, a mortuary rite in which the women and children of a family ate the flesh, and the brain, of the beloved dead as an act of grief and honour. Here, and here almost alone, the taboo the West feels as an absolute turned out to rest on something more than classification: the brains carried the infectious agent of kuru, "the trembling death," a fatal disease of the nervous system that killed the Fore in their thousands and struck women and children hardest precisely because they ate the most dangerous tissue. It was the American physician Carleton Gajdusek who proved the sickness transmissible, work for which he took the Nobel Prize in 1976, and the rite fell away as its cost was understood. The lesson cuts two ways, and both edges matter to this volume: a culture's fiercest disgust can rest on nothing more solid than a scheme of order — the anomalous pig — or on a real and lethal hazard — the Fore's inheritance of grief — and the emotion itself, which feels precisely the same in both cases, cannot tell the eater which of the two he is facing. That is exactly why disgust is an unreliable sentinel, and exactly why the chapter that follows must post a better one.

We can now answer the question the chapter opened with. A thing is edible when three conditions hold together. It must be nutritious — it must give the body more than it takes, or at the least not poison it, a bar so low that almost nothing fails to clear it. It must be safe, a genuine and non-negotiable term, and the one this volume has honoured with its warnings about toxin-laden shark and misidentified mushroom. And it must be culturally admitted — sanctioned by the eater's own people as food and not as filth. The first two terms are written by chemistry and physiology, and they are the smaller terms, for the overwhelming bulk of the animal and vegetable world is both nutritious and safe and yet goes uneaten by any given culture, walled off not by biology but by classification. The third term is by far the largest. "Edible" is very nearly a synonym for "permitted," and each people's roll of the permitted is a self-portrait, a diagram of where it has decided the world is properly cut. The naturalist adds only the observation that there are as many such diagrams as there are cultures, and that not one of them was ever written into the food.

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<g fill="#43331f" font-family="'Liberation Sans','DejaVu Sans',sans-serif" font-size="11" letter-spacing="2.5" text-anchor="middle"> <text x="112" y="299">EDIBLE</text> <text x="243" y="228">INEDIBLE</text> <text x="397" y="228">TABOO</text> <text x="530" y="299">SACRED</text> </g>

<g fill="none" stroke="#43331f"> <circle cx="320" cy="388" r="22" stroke-width="1.1"/> <path d="M320 350 C314 360 314 366 320 368 C326 366 326 360 320 350 Z" stroke="#b5502a" stroke-width="1"/> <path d="M320 368 l-6 12 M320 368 l0 14 M320 368 l6 12 M320 368 l-11 8 M320 368 l11 8" stroke="#6f5a40" stroke-width="0.6"/> </g> <text x="320" y="426" text-anchor="middle" font-family="'Liberation Sans','DejaVu Sans',sans-serif" font-size="8" letter-spacing="2" fill="#6f5a40">ONE DROP TAINTS THE WHOLE</text>

<text x="320" y="444" text-anchor="middle" font-family="'Liberation Sans','DejaVu Sans',sans-serif" font-size="13" letter-spacing="3.5" fill="#43331f">THE MAP OF THE EDIBLE</text> </svg>

<figcaption><em>Plate 10. The map of the edible: the arc a culture draws from the edible through the inedible to the taboo and the sacred, and the contamination that polices every border.</em></figcaption> </figure>

Field Note — Cheese, Seen from Outside

Set a ripe Époisses on the table and try, for the length of a breath, to see it as a visitor from a dairy-free culture would — and there are many such cultures — one in which the milk of another animal is drunk by no one past infancy, and the notion of hoarding that milk until it stiffens and reeks is self-evidently the behaviour of a madman. What sits on the plate is a mass of mammary secretion, drawn from a large ruminant, deliberately soured by bacteria, curdled with an enzyme scraped from the stomach lining of a calf, salted, and then abandoned in a cellar for weeks while fungal and bacterial colonies digest it from the outside inward and sheath it in a sticky, orange, ammoniac rind. It smells, frankly and on purpose, of the farmyard and the unwashed foot. By the reckoning of Chapter Three it is a controlled rot no less than hákarl; by the psychology of Rozin it ought to trip every contamination alarm the mouth can sound, being an animal product, decayed, and loud with the exact volatile notes that everywhere else mean spoiled, do not eat.

And it is one of the glories of the European table — wept over by gastronomes, guarded by law, ripened in the cellars of monks. The whole distance between that visitor's horror and the gastronome's rapture is the entire subject of this chapter, compressed into a single reeking object, and nothing whatever in the cheese decides the matter. The Époisses is exactly as disgusting, and exactly as delicious, as the eater's culture has trained him to find it. Disgust, like dirt — and like the durian's genius and the ortolan's shame that the chapter to come must weigh — exists in the eye, and the upbringing, of the beholder.

There is a freedom in all this, and a danger folded up inside the freedom. If disgust is learned, then it can be unlearned, and the open palate this volume has championed is only a person who has declined to mistake his own upbringing for a law of nature. But a palate with no inherited brake is a palate that must go and find another one. The reader who has followed the argument to here can no longer tell himself that he leaves the tortoise, the songbird and the whale off his plate because they fall somehow beneath the category of food; that comfortable door has swung shut, because the category was never in the food to begin with. If the old wall will not bear weight, a new and better wall must be built on purpose — not out of disgust, which we have just watched protect nothing sturdier than habit, but out of clear knowledge of what our eating costs the living world. Building that wall is the work of the chapter that follows, and it is the most important in the book.

บทถัดไป · 9 / 15Chapter 6 — The Ethics at the Edge