Mary Roach’s alimentary voyage is riddled with holes – anatomically speaking. It starts with one and ends with another and is veritably peppered with fistulas – and if that sounds like a Lakeland cooking instrument, I should warn you it isn’t.
The gastric variety is an opening from the outside of the body into the stomach and, as Roach discovers, dangling things through it is something of a medical pastime. Cabbage, beef, the ears of live rabbit – you name it, it’s been suspended through some creature’s fistula and whipped out to examine the effect of the environment it encounters. Indeed Alexis St Martin, a fur trapper in the early 19th century, experienced such experiments first hand when an unfortunate encounter with a shotgun led to an arguably even more unfortunate encounter with a surgeon named William Beaumont who became somewhat fixated with his resulting fistula. Not content with fishing about using bits of string, Roach reveals he went a step further. “For the out-of-body digestion experiments, Beaumont had St Martin hold vials of gastric juice under his arms to simulate the temperature and movements of the stomach.”
Given St Martin’s plight (though he did eventually break free from this disturbing set-up), perhaps this is not the most tasteful moment to mention that Roach is, quite frankly, side splittingly funny. As are her cast.
Indeed while the scientists Roach encounters on her journey are not in the same league as the strangely sinister Beaufort, they seem – without exception – to have a touch of the Just William about them. (Although not necessarily in appearance. Roach has an unfathomable need to catalogue the wardrobe and hairstyles of all whom she meets as though subtly compiling a scientists’ look-book). Serious and meticulous researchers exploring the physics of crunchy crisps or nuances of faecal transplants are clearly keen on a bit of showmanship, egged on by Roach who is keen, nay determined, to unearth all manner of factoids from size of grit we can detect orally (apparently 10 microns) to whether Fongoli chimps, like rabbits, eat their own poo (the answer is sort-of. They pick out the seeds, nicely softened up by one pass through the system, and send them down the chute a second time to extract the nutrients). Ask whether a meal worm could munch its way out of a stomach and someone hares off to defrost a leopard frog and rig up an experiment. Ponder the difference between stimulated saliva and the unstimulated sort and out come two plastic cups and a cotton wad.
This might be a book about the fate of our food, but naval-gazing it is not. Zipping from the States to Europe, from gleaming Research Institute canteens to the living room of George Nichopoulos (that’s Elvis’s doctor if the name is ringing a bell), Roach is not only on mission to find out what goes on inside her – and us – but to uncover some of the more unusual inventions for dealing with digestive issues.
Among those vying for the madcap award are the magnificent Mylar pantaloons: silvery breeches designed to contain various charcoal products for catching whiffy gases released by the rear, and the charmingly named ‘Joy, Beauty, Life Cascade’. The latter might sound like a spa weekend in the country with a host of tempting cocktails and a facial scrub, but no. It was a colonic irrigation system peddled as a veritable cure-all and was, as Roach delightedly reveals in one of her numerous waggish footnotes, favoured by the priests, nuns and a few wild cards: “Balancing out testimonials from the gentle and the frocked was one by Leonard Knowles, the trainer of the New York Giants American football team from 1930 to 1932.”
Roach is to science writing what pyrophosphates are to kitty food (and, as she is told on her journey, they’re known in the trade as ‘cat crack’). Take an unpalatable topic and infuse it with Roach and the result is a book it’s hard not to swallow in one sitting. Indeed Gulp is not so much gross as engrossing, but you might want to pick your timing when regurgitating its juicer morsels.
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Gulp by Mary Roach is available on the Guardian bookshop
