Technologists sometimes exploit the synergy between the two. By adding strawberry or vanilla—aromas we associate with sweetness—it’s possible to fool people into thinking a food is sweeter than it rea...
Cats are more or less monoguesic, meaning they stick to one food. Outdoor cats tend to be either mousers or birders, not both. But don’t worry, as most of the difference between Tuna Treat and Poultry...
You may be thinking, Wow, that Mary Roach has her head up her ass. To which I say: Only briefly, and with the utmost respect.
Which is something to be thankful for, says Danielle Reed, Rawson’s former colleague at Monell. Otherwise you’d be tasting things like bile and pancreatic enzymes. (Intestinal taste receptors are thou...
What does this tell us about sharks? Should women be worried? Hard to say. How crazy are sharks for seal meat? Do dead groupers smell like used tampons? Unknown. I’d stay in my deck chair, if I were m...
We are all nature, all made of the same basic materials, with the same basic needs. We are no different, on a very basic level, from the ducks and the mussels and last week’s coleslaw. Thus we should...
Verbal facility with smells and flavors doesn’t come naturally. As babies, we learn to talk by naming what we see. Baby points to a lamp, mother says, ‘Yes, a lamp,’ says Johan Lundström, a biological...
Twenty-five percent of the nurses in one study, writes Larson, had dry, damaged skin. Ironically, the nurses may be exacerbating the very thing that hand-washing seeks to prevent: the spread of infect...
Though I found this information surprising, this being the Father of Medicine we are talking about, I did not question it. You do not question an author who appears on the title page as T.V.N. Persaud...
The other way to train medics is to have them practice a skill so many times that it becomes automatic. So when the prefrontal cortex goes AWOL, when reasoning drops away, muscle memory, one hopes, wi...
The bacteria species in your colon today are more or less the same ones you had when you were six months old. About 80 percent of a person’s gut microflora transmit from his or her mother during birth...
Stanford University suggests that a two-year mission to Mars would have about the same effect on one’s skeleton. Would an astronaut returning from Mars run the risk of stepping out of the capsule into...
Sleeter Bull,* 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 s...
People come to me and say, ‘My wine stinks. What happened?’ Langstaff can read the stink. Off-flavors—or defects, in the professional’s parlance—are clues to what went wrong. An olive oil with a flavo...
People can't anticipate how much they'll miss the natural world until they are deprived of it. I have read about submarine crewmen who haunt the sonar room, listening to whale songs and colonies of sn...
People blanch to see fish meal or meat meal on a pet-food ingredient panel, but meal--which variously includes organs, heads, skin, and bones--most closely resembles the diet of dogs and cats in the w...
Penguins can shut down digestion by lowering the temperature inside their stomach to the point where the gastric juices are no longer active. The stomach becomes a kind of cooler to carry home the fis...
Not long ago, a whale biologist named Phillip Clapham sent me a photograph that illustrates the consequences of life without a doorman. Like most creatures that swallow their food whole, sperm whales...
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 off...
Nartok shows me an example of Arctic greens: cutout number 13, Caribou Stomach Contents. Moss and lichen are tough to digest, unless, like caribou, you have a multichambered stomach in which to fermen...