By Eugenia Bone
Whenever my family paid a visit to our Italian relatives in Offida or Monsampolo, small hill towns in central Italy, my dad would warn us: "Count the plates first," he'd say, pointing to a stack of four or five dishes piled at each setting, "because that's how many courses there will be." Cured meats and cheeses would be served on the top plate, as high as my siblings' and my noses, and when our aunts and cousins could get us to eat no more, they would remove that plate and fill the next with something else. These were subsistence farmers, yet ideas about hospitality and pride in manufacture led them to prepare for us multiple delicious courses, including two different pasta dishes and two different meats. You couldn't say you were full. You had to prove how good the meal was by eating to the point of being sick. In my relatives' culture, indigestion was a compliment that said this food is so good I would rather hurt myself than stop eating.
I was reminded of this anecdote after reading Elsa Richardson's "Rumbles: A Curious History of the Gut," a mouthful of a book that explores the cultural history of eating and digestion. It isn't about the workings of the gut microbiome and its many symbionts -- a truly remarkable story, but not the author's mandate. (For that, check out Rob DeSalle and Susan Perkins's "Welcome to the Microbiome," from 2015.) Ms. Richardson, a lecturer on the history of medicine at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, is interested in the meaning of the gut and how it "came to shape how we see ourselves and the world around us."
Now that's a big subject. Anyone who has witnessed the uninhibited slurping and burping that goes on in a soup joint in Chinatown knows some Chinese attitudes about the gut are very different from, say, those of the whippetlike ladies who lunch on lettuce and air on the Upper East Side. And that could be said for any culture. Which is why, probably wisely, Ms. Richardson narrows her focus to the history of the Western belly, mainly from the Victorian era onward.
"Rumbles" starts out with a dive into the network of nerves connecting the belly to the brain. The author makes the argument that "we have not one, but two brains." Indeed, current research suggests other critters may also have decentralized intelligence -- like octopuses, whose arms, with their extensive nervous systems, seem to have minds of their own. Our own guts are loaded with neurons, too. When someone says "follow your gut," that "rests on the assumption," Ms. Richardson says "that the stomach might know something the brain does not."
The author explores the role of the gut in our lives from a range of perspectives, not only anatomical and medical but also moral. We learn about the dark side of the gut, including the antiquated idea that the stomach is an organ especially vulnerable to "demonic intervention," mainly in the form of indigestion or food-induced nightmares. We're also shown some of the ways people have regulated the demands of their tummies: with table manners that emphasize dining over feeding, for example, and modest diets that were once believed to lead to temperate behavior. Today, diets are often recommended to mitigate depression. Elsewhere, the author investigates the connection between the gut and the jobs people do, from agriculture to office work, "where the rhythms of the gut meet the structures imposed by capitalism."
Chapters on politics and the gut examine, among other topics, some of the historical assumptions about obesity (what Ms. Richardson calls the "muddying of corpulence with character") that have been around since at least the 1800s, and the social assumptions underlying such modern measures as the body-mass index $(BMI)$, which is based on the bodies of white European men.
I especially enjoyed Ms. Richardson's vigorous writing about gender-related gut nonsense and its economic ramifications, which any woman who has bought a diet pill will be familiar with. Still, there is comfort in knowing that the conspiracy has been going on for a long time. Constipation, for instance, was considered well into the early 20th century to be a "distinctly female ailment" associated with haggard looks and flagging sexiness. But the condition could be remedied, it was suggested, by a "wholesome breakfast cereal." Enter cornflakes, originally conceived by the Kellogg brothers as a laxative.
All this (and more) is well illustrated with black-and-white vintage cartoons, ads and documentary photos to illuminate the text. "We have inherited a richly storied gut," Ms. Richardson writes. "If you listen carefully to its rumbles, you might find that the gut has more to say about the world than you thought."
"Rumbles" is a little like those meals in Monsampolo. Delicious, but just too much food. The book is absolutely stuffed with references, conclusions and deductions, and overcooked quotes from old English tomes with odd capitalizations. It is dense and wordy, with paragraphs consistently a page long, which make for fatiguing reading. Where Mary Roach's approach to the subject in "Gulp" (2013) was an irreverent romp, this is more like a dissertation. But while I did find "Rumbles" a bit dry and hard to swallow, the material itself, in scope and erudition, is absolutely delicious.
--Ms. Bone is the author of "Have a Good Trip: Exploring the Magic Mushroom Experience."
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November 15, 2024 10:44 ET (15:44 GMT)
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