Maureen Kennedy flips over the cricket in her heated skillet.
The insect turns over with a little plop. Its six legs wave about in the heat, its antennas twitch, its ribbed torso glistens in the sizzling oil.
When it’s done–nice and crispy brown–Kennedy pours some microwave-heated chocolate into a butterfly shaped plastic mold, drops the cooked cricket in and covers it with more chocolate.
Kennedy, who is a guide at the Insectarium, a quirky museum in northeast Philadelphia devoted solely to insects, is running through her cricket recipe in preparation for two forthcoming insect cookouts that are open to the public. The events turn people’s stomachs but still bring in the crowds.
She waits for the glob of chocolate and insect to cool. She then picks it up and examines it. The tiny end of a cricket’s leg protrudes from the deep brown chocolate.
She who hesitates will never eat crickets.
Kennedy swiftly takes a good-size bite.
“The chocolate’s pretty good,” she said. “I don’t feel it.” The “it” being the cricket.
A peculiar expression then enters her eyes. She is chewing and rapidly trying to swallow at the same time.
“Oh,” she said, through the crunchy part of her snack, “there it is.”
Go ahead, take a deep breath and say it. Get it out of your system.
Yecccchhhh!
You feel disgust, I feel disgust, all humans, it seems, feel disgust–though not necessarily over the same things. Scientists are discovering that while disgust comes with our hardware, the things that disgust us come from our software–the cues, the lessons and the beliefs of the cultures that raise us.
By the time children are 3, their menu of acceptable food has shrunk to a tiny fraction of the edible universe: A child born and raised in Philadelphia will be revulsed at the idea of eating worms, a Chinese child will think that cheese–rotted, smelly milk–is yucky and a Hindu vegetarian child in India will wrinkle his nose at meat.
There’s an important lesson here, besides the insight into cultural mores. Much of our sense of disgust is tied to food. People find other things disgusting, but even then their mental associations and reactions are often oral.
Presented with non-food-related disgusting things–say, changing a 2-year-old’s dirty diaper–people’s noses will wrinkle and their tongues will go rigid, preparing to reject a disgusting invasion. They will feel nausea. All these are the body’s built-in reactions to reject or eject something we’ve eaten.
“So much disgust generates from our own bodies, our relation to the muck and goo of our own lives,” said William Ian Miller, author of “The Anatomy of Disgust” and a historian at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.
“Nothing disgusts us that hasn’t lived or isn’t living,” he said. “Disgust is with the organic world.”
What disgusts people varies enormously, even within a culture. Paul Rozin, a University of Pennsylvania psychologist who is widely recognized as one of the country’s foremost experts on disgust, spends his time asking research subjects to pick a quarter out of a jar of green gunky mashed-up okra or by studying people’s reactions to a fake dirty diaper or presenting subjects with a pig’s head and asking them to poke its eye with a needle.
“People vary enormously,” he said. “It’s a marital problem sometimes. If you have high-disgust and low-disgust people marry or are roommates, they get into all sorts of trouble. The high-disgust person doesn’t want to use the same soap, and the low-disgust person doesn’t care whose toothbrush it is.”
In his best-selling book “How the Mind Works,” cognitive scientist Steven Pinker writes that hospitals trying to keep employees from pilfering juice simply store it in new urine-collection bottles.
“People won’t eat soup if it is served in a brand new bedpan or if it has been stirred with a new comb or fly swatter,” writes Pinker of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “You can’t pay most people to eat fudge baked in the shape of dog feces or to hold rubber vomit from a novelty store between their lips.”
Disgust is not the same as distaste: Disgust comes from the “meaning” of the action, our “associations” with eating an insect or holding plastic dog feces. It doesn’t matter that the insect may be cleaner than most of the food we eat or that the dog feces is as plastic as the ballpoint pen that you thrust into your mouth while you think.
Scientists agree that the sense of disgust evolved for eminently practical reasons. There are far more things that we can eat that are bad for us than are good for us. Disgust teaches us to limit our diets and our experiences to the known, to the safe, and to what everyone around us is eating or doing.
