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Carmen's Reviews > Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal
Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal
by
by
Carmen's review
bookshelves: non-fiction, traditionally-published, she-says, published2013
Jan 02, 2014
bookshelves: non-fiction, traditionally-published, she-says, published2013
Mary Roach is an author I can always count on to deliver an amazing book. This time she tackles digestion.
Did you know that holy-water enemas were performed at exorcisms?!
If Jonah was really eaten by a whale, could he have survived?! What if it was a shark?!
What does your pet REALLY want to eat?!
What does it feel like to stick your arm into a fistulated cow's stomach?!
What does it feel like to get a colonoscopy without sedation!?
Is it possible to burst a human stomach?! Eat yourself to death by overfilling?!
Can constipation kill you!? Is that how Elvis died?!
She will explain SCIENTIFICALLY how dragon myths were invented.
Can you literally "knock the shit/beat the shit" out of someone!?
It's VERY interesting, you'll learn A LOT, and Mary Roach is - as always - funny, fresh, and fearless. She's a great author and a very entertaining one.
If you did read my status updates, you can see that at times this book can get pretty disgusting.
But there's also a lot of wonder and amazement and beauty in the book too. You will learn a lot and the world will make more sense to you after reading it.
Finally, I am going to mention some trigger warnings. I know there's a big debate right now over whether trigger warnings are just stupid and ineffective, but I think that if you are a survivor of any of the following: (view spoiler) you might want to proceed with caution in certain chapters. While Mary Roach approaches everything with a kind of scientific glee, seeing everything with a "that's so cool, and disgusting, but in an awesome fascinating way" glow that is very effective and friendly most of the time can leave me cold when she's talking about people's lives.
Oh, and ditto on the animals. This book is nowhere near close to the horrifying animal abuse presented in STIFF, but I want to warn those who are sensitive to animal cruelty that there are some experiments on dogs and other animals discussed here that are disgusting. Again, a far cry from STIFF, but still something worth mentioning.
In NO WAY to I feel like Mary Roach is making light of anyone (or any animal's) suffering. I think she's pretty respectful and I can understand why she put the stuff in the book. But it is a very graphic book and people who have been through some shit might want to skim or skip. That's all. It still gets a 5 from me.
P.S. And you might not want to read this book while you're eating.
Did you know that holy-water enemas were performed at exorcisms?!
If Jonah was really eaten by a whale, could he have survived?! What if it was a shark?!
What does your pet REALLY want to eat?!
What does it feel like to stick your arm into a fistulated cow's stomach?!
What does it feel like to get a colonoscopy without sedation!?
Is it possible to burst a human stomach?! Eat yourself to death by overfilling?!
Can constipation kill you!? Is that how Elvis died?!
She will explain SCIENTIFICALLY how dragon myths were invented.
Can you literally "knock the shit/beat the shit" out of someone!?
It's VERY interesting, you'll learn A LOT, and Mary Roach is - as always - funny, fresh, and fearless. She's a great author and a very entertaining one.
If you did read my status updates, you can see that at times this book can get pretty disgusting.
But there's also a lot of wonder and amazement and beauty in the book too. You will learn a lot and the world will make more sense to you after reading it.
Finally, I am going to mention some trigger warnings. I know there's a big debate right now over whether trigger warnings are just stupid and ineffective, but I think that if you are a survivor of any of the following: (view spoiler) you might want to proceed with caution in certain chapters. While Mary Roach approaches everything with a kind of scientific glee, seeing everything with a "that's so cool, and disgusting, but in an awesome fascinating way" glow that is very effective and friendly most of the time can leave me cold when she's talking about people's lives.
Oh, and ditto on the animals. This book is nowhere near close to the horrifying animal abuse presented in STIFF, but I want to warn those who are sensitive to animal cruelty that there are some experiments on dogs and other animals discussed here that are disgusting. Again, a far cry from STIFF, but still something worth mentioning.
In NO WAY to I feel like Mary Roach is making light of anyone (or any animal's) suffering. I think she's pretty respectful and I can understand why she put the stuff in the book. But it is a very graphic book and people who have been through some shit might want to skim or skip. That's all. It still gets a 5 from me.
P.S. And you might not want to read this book while you're eating.
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Reading Progress
January 2, 2014
– Shelved
August 18, 2014
–
Started Reading
August 18, 2014
–
2.3%
"Just as we adorn sex with the fancy gold-leaf filigree of love, so we dress the need for sustenance in the finery of booking and connoisseurship."
page
8
August 18, 2014
–
3.16%
"There are people, anorexics, so repulsed by the thought of food inside them that they cannot bring themselves to eat. - This is an interesting take on it I must say. My kneejerk reaction was to shoot this down, but on second thought, it's interesting. I wonder if she'll be exploring anorexia in this book."
page
11
August 18, 2014
–
3.74%
"Apparently we, the American people, have the hair from the first 14 presidents framed in the National Museum of American History. Cloning, anyone?"
page
13
August 18, 2014
–
5.46%
"Langstaff has evaluated wine professionally for 20 years. In her opinion, the difference between a $500 bottle of wine and one that costs $30 is largely hype. - YES. LEARN FROM THIS, PEOPLE."
page
19
August 18, 2014
–
7.18%
"This perhaps explains how it was possible for a team of Canadian researchers to find 9 men and women willing to create a canned-cat-food flavor lexicon and a set of tasting protocols. For humans. Tasting cat food. And they couldn't be shy about it. The protocol for evaluating the "meat chunk" portion ("gravy gel having its own distinct protocol) stipulated that the sample be "moved around in the mouth and chewed..."
page
25
August 18, 2014
–
8.62%
"Pet foods come in a variety of flavors because that's what we humans like, and we assume our pets like what we like. We have that wrong. "For cats especially," Moeller says, "change is often more difficult than monotony." (In reality, the average person eats no more than about 30 foods on a regular basis. "It's very restricted...Most people ran through their entire repertoire in 4 days.""
page
30
August 18, 2014
–
9.48%
"Cats, unlike dogs and other omnivores, can't taste sweetness. - Ha! I already knew this one. :)"
page
33
August 18, 2014
–
11.21%
"I was surprised to learn that dogs lose interest when meat decays past a certain point. It is a myth that dogs will eat anything. "People think, dogs love things that are old, nasty, drug around in the dirt, Moeller told me earlier. But only to a point, he says. And for a reason. "Something that's just starting to decay still has full nutritional value.""
page
39
August 18, 2014
–
11.49%
"...1/3 of the canned dog food purchased in housing projects was consumed by people. Not because they'd developed a taste for it, but because they couldn't afford a more expensive meat product...Alpo has more nutrition than sausage, fried chicken, shrimp, ham, sirloin steak, McDonald's hamburgers, peanut butter, pure-beef hot dogs, Spam, bacon, and bologna."
page
40
August 18, 2014
–
15.52%
""Human hair, while not particularly appetizing, is Kosher," states Rabbi Zushe Blech."
page
54
August 18, 2014
–
15.8%
"To eat liver, knowing that you, too, have a liver, brushes up against the cannibalism taboo. The closer we are to a species, emotionally or phylogenetically, the more potent our horror at the prospect of tucking in, the more butchery feels like murder. Pets and primates...come under the category of "unthinkable to eat.""
page
55
August 18, 2014
–
20.11%
"More recently, the digestive action of a healthy adult male obliterated everything but 28 bones (out of 131) belonging to a segmented shrew swallowed without chewing."
page
70
August 18, 2014
–
21.26%
"On applying the tongue to the mucous coat of the stomach, in its empty, unirritated state, no acid taste can be perceived. - He is sticking his tongue into the permanently open hole in this guy's abdomen. 1823 science!"
page
74
August 18, 2014
–
23.85%
"Gently chew the tampon for one minute. This is the simplest way to collect stimulated saliva without also collecting the food that stimulated it: you chew the collection device."
page
83
August 18, 2014
–
25.86%
"The boundaries of self are routinely extended to include the bodily secretions of those we love...Saliva and vaginal secretions or semen can achieve positive value among lovers, and some parents do not find their young children's body products disgusting."
page
90
August 18, 2014
–
26.15%
"A similar psychology applies to breast milk. It's considered natural for a child to consume a mother's milk, or even for a lover to do so, but not a stranger...so reliable is breast-milk consumption as a delimiter of intimate family that Islam recognizes a category called "breast milk son" which confers an exemption to the rules on segregation of the sexes."
page
91
August 18, 2014
–
27.59%
"The Roman Catholics, whose priests used to baptize with spittle. The priests got it from the Gospel of Mark - the bit where Jesus heals the blind by mixing dirt with his saliva and rubbing the mud on the man's eyelids. "It's an interesting passage...because the writers of the gospels...redacted a line. Mark had included a bit about a blind man opening his eyes and seeing what looked like trees walking around."
page
96
August 18, 2014
–
31.61%
"Crispy foods carry a uniquely powerful appeal. I asked Chen what might be behind this seemingly universal drive to crunch things in our mouths. "I believe human being has a destructive nature in its genes...human has a strange way of stress-release by punching, kicking, smashing, and other forms of destructive actions. Eating could be one of them.""
page
110
August 18, 2014
–
32.47%
"Crispness and crunch appeal to us because they signal freshness. Old, rotting, mushy produce can make you ill. At the very least, it has lost much of its nutritional vim. So it makes sense that humans evolved a preference for crisp and crunchy foods."
page
113
August 18, 2014
–
34.77%
"In other words, the stomach, at death, begins to digest itself.... A healthy adult has a new stomach lining every three days."
page
121
August 18, 2014
–
38.79%
"Now Mary Roach is having a lab guy put hydrochloric acid on her wrist...to see what it feels like. o.O"
page
135
August 18, 2014
–
41.09%
"Now Mary Roach is sticking her arm - up to the armpit - into a living cow's fistulated stomach. "I look like I've seen God...I could feel strong, steady squeezes and movements, almost more industrial than biological. I'd felt like I'd stuck my arm into a fermentation vat with an automated mixing paddle at the bottom, and I basically had.""
page
143
August 18, 2014
–
41.95%
"Bursting a stomach by overfilling is a nearly impossible feat, owing to a series of protective reflexes."
page
146
August 18, 2014
–
42.53%
"Death of a bulimic. Sometimes Roach's descriptions of what animals and people have undergone (because of how scientifically interesting it is) makes me very upset and I have to skip a few pages."
page
148
August 18, 2014
–
44.83%
"Should circumstance prevent a man from carrying his cigarettes and cell phone in his pants pocket, the rectum provides a workable alternative. So workable that well over a thousand pounds of tobacco and hundreds of cell phones are rectally smuggled into CA state prisons each year."
page
156
August 18, 2014
–
47.7%
"Here is another reason so many drug smugglers prefer to swallow contraband, despite the risk of an overdose. "The rectum is taboo across many of the regions where mules originate. In the Caribbean and Latin America, any use of the cavity is automatically associated with homosexuality, which can still lead to a fatal beating in many communities."...The rectal taboo is equally strong among Islamic terrorists."
page
166
August 18, 2014
–
65.23%
"By far the oddest reverse delivery on record is the holy-water enema. ...suggested that the holy-water clyster was a routine weapon in the exorcist's arsenal. This made a certain amount of sense: Why sprinkle the possessed with holy water when you can pump it right up inside them?"
page
227
August 18, 2014
–
65.52%
"Is it possible to literally knock the shit out of someone? Depends on the shit and who's knocking it. "I had a high school football coach who was an offensive tackle for the Washington Redskins," says gastroenterologist Mike Jones. "He swore to me that Mean Joe Greene hit him so had he had to change his pants...it would be tough to hit someone hard enough to knock a solid turd out of him and not kill him"
page
228
August 19, 2014
–
76.44%
"Most Europeans get scoped (colonoscopy) with sedation-on-demand. You're set up with an IV ready to go, and need only say the word. 80% never ask for the drugs."
page
266
August 19, 2014
–
Finished Reading
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Aug 19, 2014 02:22PM
Wow! I can't believe someone actually made me want to read this book. Thanks Carmen!....I think. :)
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Just don't read it while you're eating, and you'll be fine! It's very fascinating. :) Thanks so much for the comment, Derek. You make me smile.
It's intense and fast-paced, but very interesting, Marita! :) Thanks for reading and commenting!
