Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal (7 page)

I like chicken skin and pork rinds. Why the hesitation over muktuk? Because to a far greater extent than most of us realize, culture writes the menu. And culture doesn’t take kindly to substitutions.

W
HAT
G
ABRIEL
N
IRLUNGAYUK
was trying to do with organs for health, the United States government tried to do for war. During World War II, the U.S. military was shipping so much meat overseas to feed troops and allies that a domestic shortage loomed. According to a 1943
Breeder’s Gazette
article, the American soldier consumed close to a pound of meat a day. Beginning that year, meat on the homefront was rationed—but only the mainstream cuts. You could have all the organ meats you wanted. The army didn’t use them because they spoiled more quickly and because, as
Life
put it, “the men don’t like them.”

Civilians didn’t like them any better. Hoping to change this, the National Research Council (NRC) hired a team of anthropologists, led by the venerable Margaret Mead, to study American food habits. How do people decide what’s good to eat, and how do you go about changing their minds? Studies were undertaken, recommendations drafted, reports published—including Mead’s 1943 opus “The Problem of Changing Food Habits: Report of the Committee on Food Habits,” and if ever a case were to be made for word-rationing, there it was.

The first order of business was to come up with a euphemism. People were unlikely to warm to a dinner of “offal” or “glandular meats,” as organs were called in the industry.
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“Tidbits” turned up here and there—as in
Life’
s poetic “Plentiful are these meats called ‘tidbits’”—but “variety meats” was the standout winner. It had a satisfactorily vague and cheery air, calling to mind both protein and primetime programming with dance numbers and spangly getups. In the same vein—ew! Sorry.
Similarly,
meal planners and chefs were encouraged “to give special attention to the naming” of new organ-meat entrées. A little French was thought to help things go down easier. A 1944
Hotel Management
article included recipes for “Brains à la King” and “Beef Tongue Piquant.”

Another strategy was to target kids. “The human infant enters the world without information about what is edible and what is not,” wrote psychologist Paul Rozin, who studied disgust for many years at the University of Pennsylvania. Until kids are around two, you can get them to try pretty much anything, and Rozin did. In one memorable study, he tallied the percentage of children aged sixteen to twenty-nine months who ate or tasted the following items presented to them on a plate: fish eggs (60 percent), dish soap (79 percent), cookies topped with ketchup (94 percent), a dead (sterilized) grasshopper (30 percent), and artfully coiled peanut butter scented with Limburger cheese and presented as “dog-doo” (55 percent). The lowest-ranked item, at 15 percent acceptance, was a human hair.
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By the time children are ten years old, generally speaking, they’ve learned to eat like the people around them. Once food prejudices are set, it is no simple task to dissolve them. In a separate study, Rozin presented sixty-eight American college students with a grasshopper snack, this time a commercially prepared honey-covered variety sold in Japan. Only 12 percent were willing to try one.

So the NRC tried to get elementary schools involved. Home economists were urged to approach teachers and lunch planners. “Let’s do more than say ‘How do you do’ to variety meats; let’s make friends with them!” chirps Jessie Alice Cline in the February 1943
Practical Home Economics.
The War Food Administration pulled together a
Food Conservation
Education
brochure with suggested variety-meat essay themes (“My Adventures in Eating New Foods”). Perhaps sensing the futility of trying to get ten-year-olds to embrace brains and hearts, the administration focused mainly on not wasting food. One suggested student activity took the form of “a public display of wasted edible food actually found in the garbage dump,” which does more than say “How do you do” to a long night of parental phone calls.

The other problem with classroom-based efforts to change eating habits was that children don’t decide what’s for dinner. Mead and her team soon realized they had to get to the person they called the “gatekeeper”—Mom. Nirlungayuk reached a similar conclusion. I tracked him down, seventeen years later, and asked him what the outcome of his country-foods campaign had been. “It didn’t really work,” he said, from his office in the Nunavut department of wildlife and environment. “Kids eat what parents make for them. That’s one thing I didn’t do is go to the parents.”

Even that can flop. Mead’s colleague Kurt Lewin, as part of the NRC research, gave a series of lectures to homemakers on the nutritional benefits of organ meats, ending with a plea for patriotic cooperation.
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Based on follow-up interviews, just 10 percent of the women who’d attended had gone home and prepared a new organ meat for the family. Discussion groups were more effective than lectures, but guilt worked best of all. “They said to the women, ‘A lot of people are making a lot of sacrifices in this war,’” says Brian Wansink, author of “Changing Eating Habits on the Home Front.” “‘You can do your part by trying organ meats.’ All of a sudden, it was like, ‘Well, I don’t want to be the only person not doing my part.’”

Also effective: pledges. Though it now seems difficult to picture it, Wansink says government anthropologists had PTA members stand up and recite, “I will prepare organ meats at least ____ times in the coming two weeks.” “The act of making a public commitment,” said Wansink, “was powerful, powerful, powerful.” A little context here: The 1940s was the heyday of pledges and oaths.
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In Boy Scout halls, homerooms, and Elks lodges, people were accustomed to signing on the dotted line or standing and reciting, one hand raised. Even the Clean Plate Club—dreamed up by a navy commander in 1942—had an oath: “I, ____, being a member in good standing . . . , hereby agree that I will finish all the food on my plate . . . and continue to do so until Uncle Sam has licked the Japs and Hitler”—like, presumably, a plate.

To open people’s minds to a new food, you sometimes just have to get them to open their mouths. Research has shown that if people try something enough times, they’ll probably grow to like it. In a wartime survey conducted by a team of food-habits researchers, only 14 percent of the students at a women’s college said they liked evaporated milk. After serving it to the students sixteen times over the course of a month, the researchers asked again. Now 51 percent liked it. As Kurt Lewin put it, “People like what they eat, rather than eat what they like.”

The phenomenon starts early. Breast milk and amniotic fluid carry the flavors of the mother’s foods, and studies consistently show that babies grow up to be more accepting of flavors they’ve sampled while in the womb and while breastfeeding. (Babies swallow several ounces of amniotic fluid a day.) Julie Mennella and Gary Beauchamp of the Monell Chemical Senses Center have done a great deal of work in this area, even recruiting sensory panelists to sniff
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amniotic fluid (withdrawn during amniocentesis) and breast milk from women who had and those who hadn’t swallowed a garlic oil capsule. Panelists agreed: the garlic-eaters’ samples smelled like garlic. (The babies didn’t appear to mind. On the contrary, the Monell team wrote, “Infants . . . sucked more when the milk smelled like garlic.”)

As a food marketing consultant, Brian Wansink was involved in efforts to increase global consumption of soy products. Whether one succeeds at such an undertaking, he found, depends a great deal on the culture whose diet you seek to change. Family-oriented countries where eating and cooking are firmly bound by tradition—Wansink gives the examples of China, Colombia, Japan, and India—are harder to infiltrate. Cultures like the United States and Russia, where there’s less cultural pressure to follow tradition and more emphasis on the individual, are a better bet.

Price matters too, though not always how you think it would. Saving money can be part of the problem. The well-known, long-standing cheapness of offal, Mead wrote, condemned it to the wordy category “edible for human beings but not by own kind of human being.” Eating organs, in 1943, could degrade one’s social standing. Americans preferred bland preparations of muscle meat partly because for as long as they could recall, that’s what the upper class ate.

So powerful are race-and status-based disgusts that explorers have starved to death rather than eat like the locals. British polar exploration suffered heavily for its mealtime snobbery. “The British believed that Eskimo food . . . was beneath a British sailor and certainly unthinkable for a British officer,” wrote Robert Feeney in
Polar Journeys: The Role of Food and Nutrition in Early Exploration.
Members of the 1860 Burke and Wills expedition to cross Australia fell prey to scurvy or starved in part because they refused to eat what the indigenous Australians ate. Bugong-moth abdomen and witchetty grub may sound revolting, but they have as much scurvy-battling vitamin C as the same size serving of cooked spinach, with the additional benefits of potassium, calcium, and zinc.

Of all the so-called variety meats, none presents a steeper challenge to the food persuader than the reproductive organs. Good luck to Deanna Pucciarelli, the woman who seeks to introduce mainstream America to the culinary joys of pig balls. “I am indeed working on a project on pork testicles,” said Pucciarelli, director of the Hospitality and Food Management Program at—fill my heart with joy!—Ball State University. Because she was bound by a confidentiality agreement, Pucciarelli could not tell me who would be serving them or why or what form they would take. Setting aside alleged fertility enhancers and novelty dare items (for example, “Rocky Mountain oysters”), the reproductive equipment seem to have managed to stay off dinner plates worldwide. Neither I nor Janet Riley, spokesperson for the American Meat Institute, could come up with a contemporary culture that regularly partakes of ovaries, uterus, penis, or vagina simply as something good to eat.

Historically, there was ancient Rome. Bruce Kraig, president of the Culinary Historians of Chicago, passed along a recipe from
Apicius
, for sow uterus sausage. For a cookbook,
Apicius
has a markedly gladiatorial style. “Remove the entrails by the throat before the carcass hardens immediately after killing,” begins one recipe. Where a modern recipe might direct one to “salt to taste,” the uterus recipe says to “add cooked brains, as much as is needed.” Sleeter Bull,
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the author of the 1951 book
Meat for the Table
, claims the ancient Greeks had a taste for udders. Very specifically, “the udders of a sow just after she had farrowed but before she had suckled her pigs.” That is either the cruelest culinary practice in history or so much Sleeter bull.

I would wager that if you look hard enough, you will find a welcoming mouth for any safe source of nourishment, no matter how unpleasant it may strike you. “If we consider the wide range of foods eaten by all human groups on earth, one must . . . question whether any edible material that provides nourishment with no ill effects can be considered inherently disgusting,” writes the food scientist Anthony Blake. “If presented at a sufficiently early age with positive reinforcement from the childcarer, it would become an accepted part of the diet.” As an example, Blake mentions a Sudanese condiment made from fermented cow urine and used as a flavor enhancer “very much in the way soy sauce is used in other parts of the world.”

The comparison was especially apt in the summer of 2005, when a small-scale Chinese operation was caught using human hair instead of soy to make cheap ersatz soy sauce. Our hair is as much as 14 percent Lcysteine, an amino acid commonly used to make meat flavorings and to elasticize dough in commercial baking. How commonly? Enough to merit debate among scholars of Jewish dietary law, or kashrut. “Human hair, while not particularly appetizing, is Kosher,” states Rabbi Zushe Blech, the author of
Kosher Food Production
, on Kashrut.com “There is no ‘guck’ factor,” Blech maintained, in an e-mail. Dissolving hair in hydrochloric acid, which creates the Lcysteine, renders it unrecognizable and sterile. The rabbis’ primary concern had not to do with hygiene but with idol worship. “It seems that women would grow a full head of hair and then shave it off and offer it to the idol,” wrote Blech. Shrine attendants in India have been known to surreptitiously collect the hair and sell it to wigmakers, and some in kashrut circles worried they might also be selling it to Lcysteine
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producers. This proved not to be the case. “The hair used in the process comes exclusively from local barber shops,” Blech assures us.
Phew.

• • •

T
HE MOST EFFECTIVE
agent of dietary change is the adulated eater—the king who embraces whelks, the revolutionary hero with a passion for skewered hearts. “Normally disgusting substances or objects that are associated with admired . . . persons cease to be disgusting and may become pleasant,” writes Paul Rozin. For organ meats today, that person has been taking the form of celebrity chefs at high-profile eateries, such as Los Angeles’s Animal and London’s St. John, and on Food Network programs. On the
Iron Chef
episode “Battle Offal,” judges swooned over raw heart tartar, lamb’s liver truffles, tripe, sweetbreads, and gizzard. If things go as they usually go, hearts and sweetbreads might start to show up on home dinner tables in five or ten years.

Time and again, AFB’s Pat Moeller has watched the progression with ethnic cuisines: from upscale restaurant to local eatery to dinner table to supermarket freezer section. “It starts as an appetizer typically. That’s low risk. Then it migrates to an entrée dish. Then it becomes a food that you can buy and take home and fix for your family.”