Savor the Stink

Savor the Stink

Last night's platter of stinky tofu at KS Seafood raised the provocative (at least to me) question: Why are you eating this stuff?

Well, for one, I’ll eat anything, twice, just on principle.

More importantly, though, I think it’s important to educate the palate, give all taste sensors a work-out now and again, just to keep them functional. Kind of like cross-training: you know you’re overworking muscles you’re probably not using on an everyday basis, but if you don’t whale on those ignored muscles groups, they atrophy.

But these are all intellectual-type rationales, and so probably irrelevant.

There’s something thrilling about eating what seems bad for you. When MikeG and I shot a Gorilla Gourmet segment with Hal McGee, the great man explained that people may be motivated to eat hot peppers out of a sense of “contained risk.” Daunting tastes may be botany’s way of thwarting predators' desire, yet we eat the plant that is futilely trying to protect itself, and although our bodies scream “Why are you eating this stuff?” we know we will live through the burning, blinding experience…and even, perhaps, sweat a little in the endorphin rush that follows. It’s exciting, flirting with death.

So why eat a platter of food that smells of garbage? Maybe garbage is an unwanted smell only because we associate it with cast-off consumables, stuff we don’t want any more. Maybe. No doubt though, some living beings like the smell of garbage. Darwin (On the various contrivances by which British and foreign orchids are fertilised by insects) noted that flies are drawn to Aristolochia grandiflora, an orchid that smells like rotting meat. And there is no denying that some people (like me) enjoy Camembert that my daughter says smells like “a foot that farted,” and others lust for durian…and stinky tofu.

An obviously easy answer is that there’s some macho satisfaction in swallowing the mescal worm, slurping down an eyeball taco, and eating other gross stuff to prove you’re a he-man or something. Possible, but I don’t think that’s it…though I’m not sure what is it, either.

David “Eater of Broken Meats” Hammond

David Hammond wrote:And there is no denying that some people (like me) enjoy Camembert that my daughter says smells like “a foot that farted...”

You clearly have another writer in the family!

The attraction many feel toward foods like Durian, fermented fish sauce, stinky tofu and Camembert (along with other stinky cheeses) may well relate to the fact that "earthy/ funky" (to be polite) olfactory stimuli such as these seem to be processed in relatively primitive brain regions deep within the Temporal lobes, in areas closely related to the limbic system, which is otherwise intimately associated with the generation and modulation of both memory and "basic" emotional response including hunger, aggression and sexual arousal. Think musk oil as an obvious example of this connection.

Food for thought.