Talk to Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal like its author wrote you back.
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What it argues
Gulp traces the alimentary canal from mouth to colon, using Mary Roach's standard method: firsthand visits to the researchers who work in each region, archival accounts of the stranger experiments in medical history, and a consistent willingness to ask the embarrassing questions that more decorous science writing leaves out. The subject is human digestion, and Roach treats it with the same combination of rigor and self-aware humor she brought to cadavers and spaceflight.
The book begins in the mouth, with food scientists who study smell, taste, and chewing, and the surprising degree to which palatability is constructed rather than intrinsic. Roach visits a pet food tasting facility (people evaluate it, not pets), explores the history of stomach research via a man named Alexis St. Martin who survived a gunshot wound leaving a permanent opening into his stomach, and sits with researchers studying gut motility, constipation, and the mechanics of rectal evacuation — a problem that turns out to be more complex than most people realize.
What it gets right
- 1.
Flavor is constructed primarily from smell rather than taste, which is why food tastes flat when you have a cold. True taste (the tongue's contribution) is limited to five categories.
- 2.
Stomach acid is strong enough to dissolve metal but the stomach lining regenerates so rapidly that ulcers are caused by bacteria and stress overcoming that regeneration, not acid alone.
- 3.
Alexis St. Martin, a 19th-century trapper who survived a gunshot wound with a permanent gastric fistula, was the subject of research that produced the first detailed knowledge of human stomach function.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Mary Roach is an American science writer known for bringing humor and rigorous reporting to subjects most writers avoid. She is the author of seven books, including Stiff, Bonk, Packing for Mars, and Grunt, each exploring a different area of human biology or applied science. Roach has written for National Geographic, Outside, and Wired, among others. Her books reliably combine firsthand reporting, archival research, and a willingness to ask experts the questions everyone else is too polite to raise.
