Apparently, half of the population lack a certain enzyme in the colon that is needed to break down the complex carbohydrates in legumes. If you’ve never wondered, too bad Roach is going to tell you anyway. If you’ve ever wondered why some people complain of gassiness after beans, while others eat them with impunity, Roach has the answer. If a fart smells of rotten eggs, this indicates the presence of hydrogen sulfide if of rotten vegetables, it’s dimethyl sulfide. Roach parses the “olfactory notes” of “noxious flatus,” the technical term for gas.

You will discover that delicious food does not in fact make our mouths water (though nausea may) and that obese people surprisingly have the same stomach capacity as everyone else (they just eat more). Roach leads us through the esophagus, the intestines, and the colon, giving us countless revolting but fascinating factoids along the way. Squeamish readers, be warned: There is TMI on every page. Public health officials perkily try to sell children on eating more vegetables “because of the vitamins” rather than telling them what really happens when they don’t eat their greens (around 30 percent of all American kids are constipated, going on estimates from dietetic pediatricians).įar from avoiding the grossness of digestion, Roach revels in it. Now, we tend talk of the consequences of food only in terms of whether it will make us fat, ignoring the more pressing business of digestion. Our grandparents openly spoke of foods being “indigestible” or making them “bilious” if they ate too much of them. But we are arguably more coy about the stomach than any previous generation. Thinking about digestion is a nasty appetite killer.

Peter Greenaway’s 1989 film, The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, played on the fact that the comfort of middle-class life depends on keeping the pleasures of dinner well apart from its inescapable upshot in the bathroom. To a certain extent, this has always been true. We are in collective denial about what ingesting a meal really entails. Chewing, salivating, and digesting, never mind excreting, are aspects of a meal we do our best to forget as we pore over photos of toast with ramp butter and quail’s eggs or slow-braised veal shank. It is one of the paradoxes of our culture that while food itself is an object of desire, the mechanics of eating-in the abstract, anyway-really gross us out.

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