Monday, May 12, 2008
What tastes worse than rodent knee and saliva-flavored manioc mash? It depends where you come from, as Mary Roach learns in a remote Amazon village.
Dec 15, 1998 | In 1986, a psychologist named Paul Rozin took a group of toddlers and did a peculiar thing. One by one, he sat them down at a table and presented them with a plate of what he said was dog-doo and asked them if they'd like to eat it. (In fact, it was peanut butter, scented with bleu cheese.) Then he did the same with a sterilized grasshopper. Sixty-two percent of the children under 2 happily dispatched the ersatz turd; 31 percent the insect. Older children invariably rejected both plates. His point: Disgust is learned. Culture is our instructor. We are taught that horse meat is disgusting but chicken embryos are not; that Slim Jims are tasty and crickets are gross.
Espousing, as I have, a belief that nothing is inherently disgusting, that it's all a case of mind over culture, I have frequently, in my travels, felt the need to put my money where my mouth is and my mouth where it would rather not go. I have eaten walrus meat left buried on an Arctic beach to "ferment" for a month, a raw fish eye and its accompanying musculature, duck tongue, caribou marrow, brain, flipper, ant. I am, yes, one of those annoying travelers who boast about the disgusting food they've lived to tell about (and tell about and tell about).
Now I am getting my come-uppance. I am getting it big-time, in a small village in the Ecuadorian Amazon. I have come here to do a story on an anthropologist named John Patton. Patton studies a tribe called the Achuar, notable for their skill in blowgun-making and their long-ago rivalry with the head-shrinking Chuar. (If you've seen an authentic South American shrunken head, you've probably seen an Achuar tribesman.) Patton's base is Conambo, a scatter of houses along a fast, muddy river, reachable every now and again by a four-seater missionary plane. There is no hotel, no restaurant, no store. You eat what they hunt.
I am fast coming to understand that there is a huge difference, a vast yawning canyon of difference, between tasting something deeply unappealing and living on it. Anyone, if he tries, can suppress his disgust long enough to swallow a single fish eye or a mouthful of decaying walrus. Eating enough of this sort of thing to live on is altogether a different matter. I am here for five days. I'm not doing very well.
My problem at the moment is a knee. It's a rodent knee, quietly genuflecting in a bowl of oily broth. Earlier today, the knee was attached to a happy, hairy, spaniel-sized rodent, gamboling and cavorting in the wee hours of the rain forest morning until our host happened along and plugged it full of buckshot. (Blowguns are used only on birds and pack animals like monkeys, which would be scared off by gunshot.)
The knee is one of nature's marvels, a busy intersection of tendon, bone and cartilage. Be that as it may, "marvel" does not exactly describe my state of mind at the moment. Extreme psychic discomfort comes closer. The hunter and the chef are sitting directly across from me. Their generosity is heartbreaking. I have to clean my plate. I must force apart the gristly abomination with my teeth, work my tongue into its fissures and slimy orifices, extract anything vaguely chewable, and swallow it. I lean over to scout the contents of Patton's bowl.
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