That’s Disgusting: Unraveling the Mysteries of Repulsion by Rachel Herz

last updated 8 January 2015

Maggot cheese, anyone? said Jeff Simon in The Buffalo News. On page 5 of Rachel Herz’s “very entertaining, vastly informative,” and, yes, quite disgusting book, we learn about casu marzu, a sheep’s milk cheese from Sardinia that’s ready to eat only when it’s infested with insect larvae. On the same page, there’s a description of chicha, a popular Ecuadoran drink made from a mix of chewed cornmeal and saliva, which is spit into a jug and buried in the ground to ferment before it’s finally consumed. If you can stomach such descriptions, you’ll get a kick out of this “fascinating all the way through” inquiry into what makes us retch and why.

At one point, “I wrote, ‘O.K., that does it,’ in the margin—and I was only on page 17,” said Robin Marantz Henig in The New York Times. But I persisted because of Herz’s insights. Unlike fear, disgust is not an automatic response; it unfolds relatively slowly within the brain as we contemplate the smelly sneakers or slimy insects before us. It’s also malleable: Obsessive-compulsive disorder is “basically nonstop disgust,” while people with Huntington’s disease become essentially “disgust-blind.” An American’s gag reflex might be triggered if he just reads about hakarl—a dish featuring rotting shark meat—while Icelanders might salivate at the same passage.

“Herz seems to have a perfect example for nearly every type of disgust you can imagine,” said Becky Krystal in The Washington Post. She also shows us how humans learned to use disgust to dehumanize criminal behavior or unfairly marginalize immigrant groups, homosexuals, and others. As she reels off one unsettling image after another, “the more disgust-sensitive out there—take the quiz in the book to see if you’re one of them!—might feel as though Herz is piling it on just to make a point about our irrational reactions.” Her larger point, however, is “well worth making.” If we can learn to understand why we find a certain sight, smell, taste, or idea disgusting, “it might not be so disgusting after all.”