Omelette

A little while back I made myself an omelette for dinner. In the omelette I included salsa, bacon bits, cheese, sauteed onions, peppers, and tofu – along with eggs and milk, of course. None of the ingredients appeared spoiled. None smelled bad. But later that night I got violently ill. To my mind it was clearly a case of food poisoning.  This despite the fact that no one else in the family experienced any symptoms at all after having consumed each of the ingredients in other dishes prepared separately. More recently I was considering what to make myself for dinner and my wife suggested I make an omelette. Nope, I replied. I’m off omelettes for a while.

 

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Molly Young has an article in the current NY Times magazine called “How Disgust Explains Everything.” It is a long one, so I’m guessing you’re not likely to read it start-to-finish. But on the off  chance you’re even mildly interested, you can find it here. Trigger warning: There are a lot of pictures of maggoty meat and spoiled raspberries and sketchy mushrooms in this piece, so think twice before clicking the link and partaking. As a more hygienic alternative, feel free to read the selected excerpts I’ve culled for your consumption below. One thing Ms. Young fails to mention is the linguistic derivation of the word, which I’m including here just to make the gustatory roots of the term clear.

 

dis·​gust |

\ di-ˈskəst \ dis-ˈgəst \

: to provoke to loathing

: be offensive to

: to cause (one) to lose an interest or intention

 

Derivation

Middle French desgouster, from des- dis- + goust taste, from Latin gustus; akin to Latin gustare, to taste.

 

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Once you are attuned to disgust, it’s everywhere. On your morning commute you may observe a tragic smear of roadkill on the highway, or shudder at the sight of a rat browsing garbage on the subway tracks. At work you glance with suspicion at the person who neglects to wash his filthy hands after a trip to the toilet. At home you change your child’s diaper, unclog the shower drain, empty your cat’s litter box, pop a zit, throw out the fuzzy leftovers in the fridge. If you manage to complete a single day without experiencing any form of disgust you are either a baby or in a coma.

 

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Disgust shapes our behavior, our technology, our relationships. It is the reason we wear deodorant, use the bathroom in private, and wield forks instead of eating with our bare hands. I floss my teeth as an adult because a dentist once told me as a teenager that “Brushing your teeth without flossing is like taking a shower without removing your shoes.” Do they teach that line in dentistry school, or did he come up with it on his own? Either way, 14 words accomplished what a decade of parental nagging hadn’t.

Unpeel most etiquette guidelines, and you’ll find a web of disgust-avoidance techniques. Rules governing the emotion have existed in every culture at every time in history. And although the “input” of disgust — that is, what exactly is considered disgusting — varies from place to place, its “output” is narrow, with a characteristic facial expression (called the “gape face”) that includes a lowered jaw and often an extended tongue; sometimes it’s a wrinkled nose and a retraction of the upper lip. The gape face is often accompanied by nausea and a desire to run away or otherwise gain distance from the offensive thing, as well as the urge to clean oneself.

The more you read about the history of the emotion, the more convinced you might be that disgust is the energy powering a whole host of seemingly unrelated phenomena:  From our never-ending culture wars to the existence of kosher laws to 4chan to mermaids. Disgust is a bodily experience that creeps into every corner of our social lives, a piece of evolutionary hardware designed to protect our stomachs that expanded into a system for protecting our souls.

 

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<… Disgust is> above all about food and the fact that humans have immense dietary flexibility. Unlike koalas for instance – who eat almost nothing but eucalyptus leaves – humans must gaze at a vast range of eating options and figure out what to put in our mouths. Disgust evolved as one of the great determinants of what to eat: If a person has zero sense of disgust, (s)he will probably eat something gross and die. On the other hand, if a person is too easily disgusted, (s)he will probably fail to consume enough calories and will also die. It’s best to be somewhere in the middle, approaching food with a healthful blend of fear and love of the new…

The focus on food makes intuitive sense. After all, we register disgust in the form of nausea or vomiting — nausea being the body’s cue to stop eating and vomiting our way of hitting the “undo” button on whatever we just ate.  If disgust were solely a biological phenomenon, it would look the same across all cultures. But it does not. Nor does it explain why we experience disgust when confronted with topics like bestiality or incest or the smell of a stinky armpit or the idea of being submerged in a pit of cockroaches: None of these have anything to do with food.

 

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As you will know if you’ve already clicked the link and read to the end, it’s in the political realm where this tale gets really interesting. But to get there you may have to endure some disgusting details that might make you queasy. The upshot? For reasons having to do with links between our moral matrices and our political convictions, liberals are more likely than conservatives to be “disgust-insensitive.”  <Sorry folks. I don’t make ’em up, I just report ’em.>

But hey, look on the bright side: No matter where you fall on the political spectrum, unlike me you can still have an omelette for dinner. That’s gotta be worth something at least, right?