Hey, Vsauce. Michael here.
Eating your own boogers
is gross, but it might be smart. Assuming you have
clean fingers, lung specialist Friedrich Bischinger points out that snot
contains antiseptic enzymes that kill
or weaken bacteria. Reintroducing
those crippled microorganisms may allow your immune system to develop antibodies
in relative safety. Now, that is good to know-
-nose. But is eating your own snot
cannibalism(?) Self
cannibalism. Just like a cow or chicken or fish or fruit or vegetable you are made out of alot of
edible things. The meat on an average human body contains 77,000 dietary calories worth
of nutritional energy. Yum(!) If you decide to become a cannibal, just don't show up late for dinner
or you'll get the cold shoulder.
Jokes aside, cannibalism is a major
taboo. It's off-putting at a visceral level.
Humans have dignity, they are more than just skin bags full of organs.
They're more than just
something to put on a plate. But human meat has been put on
plates... and in bellies. There are reports of cannibalism occurring
in times of famine as a last resort, and because of
curiosity and art. In the late 1980s,
artist Rick Gibson publicly ate human tonsils
and other donated human parts in London and Canada.
In 2006, artist Marco Evaristti cooked and canned
meatballs prepared with his own body fat,
removed via liposuction. In 2011,
Dutch TV presenters Dennis Storm and Valerio Zeno cooked and ate
pieces of each other on a TV show whose title
meant "guinea pigs". Because both of them lived, and
both consented to the act, they didn't do anything
illegal. One year later, a Japanese man posted
this tweet. Five diners took up his offer and on April 13th, 2012,
they were served a $250 per plate meal consisting
of his genitals. A darker story occurred in 2001,
when Armin Meiwes ate and killed
a volunteer he found on the now defunct Cannibal Cafe.
Although his meal ostensibly consented to the menu,
Meiwes was convicted of murder and
now, serving a life sentence in prison, has become
a devout vegetarian. Disgust aside, one question
remains. If you were to use your taste buds
to taste your
bud, what would it taste like? To be clear,
taste is a sensation caused by something in your mouth chemically reacting with receptors
in your taste buds. Flavor is the even more complex
experience of taste, combined with smell, and information, from the trigeminal nerve
about things like temperature, texture, pain
and pungency, as far as the cooked but otherwise
unadulterated spice-less, sauce-less flavor
of human meat. The late William Seabrook
provided, in my opinion, the best description.
While in West Africa, Seabrook interviewed members of the Gear tribe,
people who
had eaten human flesh and found their descriptions unsatisfactory. So,
when he returned to Paris he struck a sneaky deal with an intern
at the Sorbonne and obtained a chunk
of human meat from an otherwise healthy body recently involved
in an accident. He carefully prepared the meat and wrote that,
quote, "It was like good, fully developed veal.
Not young, but not yet beef. It was
mild, good meet with no other sharply defined or highly characteristic
tastes, such as, for instance, goat, high game
and pork. The steak was slightly tougher than prime veal, a little stringy, but not
too tough or stringy
to be agreeably edible. The roast, from which I cut and ate
a central slice, was tender and in color,
texture, smell as well as taste strengthened my certainty
that, of all the meats we habitually know, veal
is the one meat to which at this meat is accurately
comparable." Seabrook never gave us any recipes or complementary flavor
recommendations.
But that brings us to this video's title's second meaning.
What does human taste like?
What does the human palate prefer? Interestingly,
of all the possible combinations of identified
flavors we consume, human cuisine only features
a relatively small number of recipes.
A couple of years ago scientific reports published a great paper on
the chemistry and networks behind food pairing.
Researchers took 381 ingredients used in five global cuisines
and 1,021 molecular compounds known to contribute to their flavors
and created a flavor network.
The size of the bubble represents the ingredients prevalence in cooking.
The thickness of the lines connecting ingredients reflects the number
of flavor inducing molecules they significantly share.
The researchers' flavor network backbone spans
fourteen different food categories and is quite interesting.
By comparing this network to tens of thousands of recipes
they found that North American and Western European dishes tend to combine
ingredients that share
flavor compounds, while East Asian cuisine
avoids them. But that trend was caused by a few
out lighters in each cuisine, that, if ignored, caused the difference in amount
of sharing to lessen. Those few ingredients
tend to be the most authentic. They tend to be the most responsible for the taste palette
of a regional cuisine and contribute to this
illuminating visualization. But some flavors don't go together
in any cuisine. For instance, orange juice
and toothpaste. Why does orange juice taste so disgusting right after brushing?
Well, most toothpastes contain sodium lauryl sulfate - a chemical that helps the
paste get sudsy and frothy during use.
That action helps pull brushed off debris away from your teeth,
but sodium lauryl sulfate also suppresses sweet receptors
in your mouth and destroy phospholipids that inhibit
your bitter receptors, making sweet orange juice
taste not so sweet and grossly
bitter, for up to an hour after brushing.
What interests me the most about flavor is the fact that the
things that cause it eventually become
you! You are what you eat, scientifically.
Your body is always losing dead cells but the elements and molecules you
ingest are processed by your body into
new body. Here's a fun way to think about it.
Under the direction of DNA, a cat
is made out of air, water and cat food.
That's it. Cats have less varied diets than
humans. We can taste sweetness but cats
lack the gene required to do so. However, they can taste
ATP, a molecule that moves around chemical energy for cells to use in the
body, which may be a sign to them
that they're tasting meat. The point is,
sights and sounds and textures and shapes and smells
are the names we give to things that eventually become our memories.
But flavor is the name we give to the experience of things that eventually become
our bodies. Contemplating the
flavor of human meat is gross. But think of it this way:
you're currently tasting human, you're tasting human right now.
Your tongue and taste buds are in contact with your mouth
almost constantly. Now, granted, it's more of a passive thing - your mouth just
happens to contain
your tongue. You're not actually eating
yourself... but you kind of are.
Your body is constantly swallowing your own mucus
and digesting pieces of your body like dead cells from your tongue
and cheek. But that's nothing compared to the self cannibalism
of the sea squirt. The sea squirt lives a sort of
self-cannibalistic 'Flowers for Algernon' life.
When born, it resembles a tadpole and has a notochord,
putting it in the same phylum as humans. It swims around until it finds a nice place
to adhere. A rock, a plant.
Once stuck, it begins retrogressive
metamorphosis. Literally digesting its own nervous system, eating the closest thing
it ever had to a brain
and lives the rest of its life in a sensile un-locomoting
clump. It is a bit of a downgrade,
but they are prime evidence that the evolution of the brain was spawned by
the need
to move as soon. As these guys don't need to move around,
they eat their brains. That is way more extreme than the self-cannibalism
you participate in every day
by swallowing. But don't feel bad. About every three months or so
you swallow and digest your own
body weight worth of you.
That means that every day you are a little more than one percent of the
mythical
ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail.
You are what you eat but you are also a thing
that you eat.
And as always,
thanks for watching.