I finally made it through a Mary Roach book! Yes, it was easier read on pages, than listened to via audiobook. For some reason this way my brain was able to skip over all the tedious humor. It did get a bit tiresome still, whether from the gross factor or the writing style I’m not sure- but I took breaks and read three other books in the middle of this one. This author has an odd slant on things. Definitely seems to just be satisfying her curiosity, and thus by extension the readers’, though I’m sure most others, like me, never realized they had any interest in the things Mary Roach delves into. She’ll be talking along almost normally about the pressure of your jaws in chewing and how delicate and instantaneous the subconscious control of that is- and then suddenly dive into another subject entirely, on a weird tangent, it’s like constantly tripping out of the converstion and falling down a series of rabbit holes you never knew existed. With plenty of strange and obscure details.
The focus here is on how we eat- what attracts us to food, cultural norms and taboos, how the senses dictate what we like, why crunchy foods are satisfying, how food scientists decide what pet food will taste like, how strong are the stomach’s digestive juices, can parasites chew their way out of a stomach, people who put objects up their nether regions (for smuggling or pleasure), reasons people were given nutrients that way, an absurd amount of text spent on flatulence, why many animals digest things twice (especially rodents who eat their own droppings) and SO MUCH MORE. More than you ever wanted to know. Not sure what was more stomach-turning, reading about awful experiments done on animals and patients alike in times not-so-distant past, or reading about some unpleasant ailments of the digestive system. I was a bit miffed at how flippantly dismissive the author was about gluten intolerance, and I suspect people who suffer from other maladies will feel the same about her attitude towards other things in this book that are too close to home for them. It’s all very flippant, snarky, gleeful in the details (often when you didn’t want that) and yes, very satisfying if you were dying of curiosity to know some things.
Honestly I think the best part of the book is two pages where she discusses the apparent source for myths about fire-breathing dragons. That was fantastic. But I need a good long break before I read another book by this author, ha.
Borrowed from the public library.