Something in contemporary Western diets must shift, for both moral and ecological reasons. Fortunately, there are alternatives to our current food system – ways of eating that are equally, if not more, nutritious but without the suffering and climate impacts of factory-farmed meat. Unfortunately, many people find these alternatives disgusting.
I know, because I’ve been one of those people. My interest in disgust began almost two decades ago in graduate school, when I encountered an article describing scientists’ attempts to grow meat without animals. ‘In vitro meat’, now known as ‘cultivated meat’ or ‘lab-grown meat’, involves cultivating muscle tissue in bioreactors, using growth media and scaffolding to create threads of muscle that could then be massed together into hamburger patties or even a steak.
The idea of growing muscle tissue in labs for human consumption, independently of an animal body, seemed unnatural and repellent. It seemed, in a word, disgusting. But faced with more humane, sustainable options, is disgust a good enough reason to reject them? Is it any kind of reason at all?
In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), Charles Darwin describes showing his lunch of potted meat to a curious islander on Tierra del Fuego. Darwin recounts the man prodding the surface of the meat with his finger, expressing disgust at its softness. Meanwhile, Darwin remembers, he too was disgusted, at having his lunch touched by a ‘naked savage, though his hands did not appear dirty.’
To a contemporary reader, the story evokes an ambivalent response. Yes, having one’s food touched by a stranger is disgusting; yes, Darwin’s response to this stranger is xenophobic, driven more by the man’s identity and culture than by any real threat of pollution. The fact that the possibility of intangible, invisible contamination can put someone off an otherwise appetising meal speaks to the ideational power of disgust. The fact that disgust can also originate in beliefs about identity and foreign-ness illustrates the problem with disgust in general, and disgust as a guide to what to eat in particular. Sometimes it protects us, and sometimes it misleads us. The question is: when, if ever, is disgust worth listening to?
The catalogue of things that disgust us is vast, but the core class of disgust elicitors involves bodily fluids (faeces and urine; pus, vomit, saliva, and snot) and exposed viscera. If it’s unclear what this has to do with food, well, that’s the point. Disgust originates in a fundamental problem: to survive, we have to eat, but eating can kill us. That’s because food is potentially contaminated by invisible pathogens and poisons, so it’s not enough to avoid eating faeces or vomit – one must avoid eating anything that comes into contact with faeces.
Taste solves part of this problem: our aversion to bitter and attraction to sweet tracks (albeit imperfectly) toxins, which tend to be bitter. But rejecting poisons is only half the battle. Pathogens and parasites can lurk, undetectable, in almost any food. Enter disgust.
Chocolate shaped like dog poop is disgusting even when we know the resemblance is merely superficial
Disgust is more extreme than dislike. A disliked food might be moved to the side of the plate; a disgusting food contaminates anything it touches, rendering it unfit for consumption. Physically, it is expressed through the characteristic ‘disgust face’: a wrinkled nose and raised upper lips. This is accompanied by a reflexive withdrawal from the offending object and, in extreme cases, nausea, increased salivation, even gagging. It’s also more flexible, and that’s part of the problem.
Psychologically, disgust creates the impression of contamination, and a corresponding desire to cleanse or purify. It prevents us from ingesting vomit or faeces, but it also protects us against eating foods we know or even suspect might have come into contact with these things. To accomplish this, disgust operates according to the laws of ‘sympathetic magic’: contagion (disgust can spread from one object to another via even brief contact) and similarity (superficial similarity indicates a deeper resemblance). For example, a cookie that a cockroach has walked on is transformed from delicious to disgusting, even once the cockroach is long gone. Similarity means that a piece of delicious chocolate shaped like dog poop is disgusting even when we know, intellectually, the resemblance is merely superficial. These associations are powerful, too: in experiments, subjects will refuse to drink a glass of juice into which a cockroach has been briefly dipped, even when they know the cockroach has been sterilised.
From an evolutionary point of view, it makes sense that disgust is conservative and overprotective, since the cost of getting it wrong could be high. But when directed at people and their behaviours, overprotective errors have their own moral costs. In the 1980s, AIDS patients were viewed with disgust and treated as a source of contamination; Diana, Princess of Wales made headlines by shaking hands with AIDS patients without wearing gloves, and hugging a seven-year-old boy with AIDS.
When directed at people, disgust causes more harm than it prevents. Research has found that extreme bigotry correlates with high levels of disgust, more than any other emotion. Nazis used the language of contamination and purity to refer to Jews, describing them as cockroaches and rats. Disgust drives intolerance, and intolerance finds expression in the language of disgust.
This has led some philosophers – the ‘disgust sceptics’ – to argue that disgust should play no role in moral judgments. The abuse of disgust rhetoric to mobilise racism, sexism and homophobia shows that the reaction is both unreliable as a guide to moral wrongness, and a dangerous tool that threatens to stigmatise and dehumanise its object.
If disgust is merely a proxy for difference, it’s not a reliable guide to danger in today’s food system
Why hasn’t our disgust towards food been subjected to the same scrutiny? One reason is that food seems more personal, and less susceptible to persuasion, than morality. As the saying goes, De gustibus non disputandum est – there’s no disputing taste. We like what we like; to each his own yuck. These likes and dislikes feel personal; they’re part of our identities. A world where everyone liked the same things would be boring, and part of what builds community is finding others who share our tastes, and debating with people who don’t.
And taste isn’t just personal – what people like is heavily influenced by culture. For example, American and European eaters tend to associate slimy textures with spoilage and find slimy foods disgusting; in Japan, the term ‘neba-neba’ refers to slimy, gooey foods like natto (fermented soybeans) that are full of insoluble fibre and (apparently) exceptionally healthy.
There’s an evolutionary explanation for this: familiarity indicates safety; at a time when any new food could be dangerous, strange smells, textures and flavours are best avoided. But if disgust is merely a proxy for difference, it’s not a reliable guide to danger in today’s food system. It can even deter us from eating otherwise nutritious or sustainable foods such as cultivated meat or insects.
Disgust is a gut reaction, but it’s also highly sensitive to our beliefs about the food in question. Recall the sterilised cockroach: even when we know a food is clean and safe to eat, it can still elicit a strong disgust reaction. That’s not because there’s something inherently disgusting about cockroaches. It’s because disgust is culturally conditioned, and our cultural attitudes towards insects tell us that they are not things to be eaten. But the idea that insects are creepy or gross is far from culturally universal. If disgust is known to be overcautious and driven as much by cultural prejudices as actual contamination, is it time to reconsider the cockroach?
As someone who grew up in New York City, it’s a hard question for me to ask – I find cockroaches so revolting that, even as I write, I’m tempted to change the example to ‘cricket’, an insect I consider fairly friendly. In that, I’m not alone. Proponents of entomophagy often refer to crickets as ‘the gateway bug’: as insects go, they’re relatively benign-looking; they don’t sting or bite; they’re familiar from our backyards and have positive cultural associations. Unlike cockroaches, they don’t lurk in corners or scuttle through cracks in the wall. And they’re crunchy, not squishy. So, when I was confronted with the opportunity to put theory into practice and actually eat an insect, crickets seemed as good a place to start as any.
My first cricket was underwhelming, in a good way. Crunchy, a little sharp around the edges, mostly tasting of the spices it was coated with; perhaps a slightly musty flavour, but nothing that screamed ‘bug’ (whatever one might imagine). From crickets, it’s a short hop to ants, which contribute a more distinctive flavour: their formic acid gives them a citrusy bite, which turns out to be a pleasant complement to the guacamole I first tasted them with. Visually, the black ants make a striking contrast to the bright green avocado. I was fortunate to be introduced to ants, and grasshoppers, by the chef Mario Hernandez, whose New York City restaurant the Black Ant (which has since closed) incorporated ants and grasshoppers into its Mexican dishes. During an event on edible insects, the chef described traditional harvesting techniques, which involve beating crops with nets to catch the grasshoppers in the tall alfalfa fields.
Joseph Yoon, who calls himself an ‘edible insect ambassador’, has made it his mission to open people’s eyes to insects – not because they’re sustainable, but because they’re tasty. Aristotle praises the sweetness of the female cicada, best eaten when they’re full of fertilised eggs. This always seemed a step too far for me, personally – unlike a crunchy cricket, when I imagined eating a cicada, I always assumed there would be a squishiness involved that even today makes me recoil a bit. But when I attended a tasting run by Yoon, and found out cicadas would be on the menu, I decided it was time to walk the walk – or, at least, eat the bug. To my pleasant surprise, tempura cicada tastes a lot like shrimp.
Sometimes, enquiring into a food’s production reveals the aptness of disgust
Taste is not the only reason to eat insects, and it’s rarely the first one mentioned. They’re a good source of protein, iron and micronutrients, while being low in saturated fat. They’re less vulnerable to disease outbreaks, and less likely to spread diseases to humans. Insect farming is sustainable, especially compared with other protein sources: they require little water and space, and produce very little waste and low emissions. They have a high ‘feed conversion ratio’ – it takes about 10 kg of food to make 1 kg of beef, but only about 1.7 kg to produce 1 kg of crickets.
In cases like this, disgust doesn’t seem to be protecting us. But one might think this shows not that disgust is wrong, but that we’re disgusted by the wrong things. Perhaps the solution is to redirect our disgust towards different foods. Could disgust even be a force for positive change? Sometimes, enquiring into a food’s production reveals the aptness of disgust. For example, reading about conditions in slaughterhouses and meat-processing plants might highlight the possibility that meat could carry bacteria, making it more disgusting. In 2009, The New York Times published an expose on the use of ammonia-treated ground beef in school lunches. When photos showing ‘pink slime’ – a slurry made from mechanically separated meat, treated with ammonia, out of which burgers, hot dogs and chicken nuggets are made – hit the internet, commenters reacted with disgust. But while it may seem naive to think that nuggets would be made with anything other than a ‘meat smoothie’, concerns about contamination of meat are not unfounded.
And sometimes the food in question really does violate a deeply held moral commitment or principle. Discussing why we eat some animals but not others, the philosopher Cora Diamond points out that these boundaries are part of what constitutes our relationships to categories like ‘pet’ and ‘vermin’: people who eat their pets do not really have pets, because pets are not for eating. Similarly, one might be disgusted by foie gras because of the way it’s often produced: by force-feeding ducks through a tube down their throat, until their liver expands to 600 per cent of its normal size. When our moral view of a food shifts, disgust can come along for the ride: people who make the switch to vegetarianism for moral reasons report coming to find meat disgusting, more so than those who switch for health reasons.
But the potential accuracy of disgust must be balanced against the costs of directing such a strong reaction at something as personal and culturally significant as food, and too often disgust is informed by bias, not science. The belief that insects are disgusting is driven by cultural representations and prejudice. Contemporary Americans are more likely to encounter entomophagy (eating insects) in imagined dystopian futures, or Fear Factor-type challenges. This reinforces the idea that insects are something to be feared, a food of last resort. It also implies that no one would voluntarily eat such things – but, of course, many people around the world do, and they are not immune from the effects of these expressions of disgust.
Denigrating and dehumanising racial or religious groups by comparing them to animals is obviously problematic. But denigrating a group because of which animals they eat is problematic in its own way. Describing a food as disgusting creates a stigma that transfers to those who consume it; according to the law of contagion, to eat the disgusting food is to become, oneself, disgusting (hence slurs like ‘frog’, referring to certain nationalities in terms of their food choices). Disgust at a culture’s food choices functions as a form of xenophobia. After all, the saying tells us, we are what we eat. So, if what we eat is disgusting, where does that leave us?
If disgust is sometimes a reason to avoid foods, it’s a weak one. And the reasons to avoid disgust far outweigh its benefits. But is disgust something that can be overcome? In extreme cases, such as eating vomit or faeces, maybe not – and that’s not a bad thing. No one is arguing that we should eat boogers. But in the case where we’re disgusted by an edible substance – a food – there are steps we can take to overcome our reaction.
One strategy is exposure: not just encountering the foods themselves, but seeing others eat them. Another involves finding similarities with foods one already eats – for example, highlighting the similarities between insects and shellfish. When first presented with shrimp, the Goshute Native Americans – whose traditional diet included crickets, locusts and grasshoppers – referred to them as ‘sea crickets’. More recently, attempts have been made to rebrand locusts as ‘sky prawns’.
In fact, shellfish are an instructive comparison. Lobster was long considered a ‘trash food’, suitable only for prisoners or the very poor. When cheese first appeared in Western Europe, for example, it was treated with suspicion and even revulsion. In The Anatomy of the Senses (1994), the Italian historian Piero Camporesi wrote that cheese curds were seen as the excremental part of milk itself. Prepared mainly by peasant women, cheese was feared unclean; eating it would lead to a kind of putrefaction inside one’s intestines. This physical filthiness was mirrored by a cultural corruption: ‘the border between civilisation and barbarism was unquestionably constituted by the white line of milk, whether it had been fermented or curdled.’
Anyone who’s experienced the thrill of that first raw oyster will know the sensation of conquering food fear
For many eaters today, cheese sits squarely on the side of civilisation. But the example shows that the meanings associated with foods are mutable. Instead of associating entomophagy – or cheese – with something dirty or dystopian, one might opt to frame the practice in terms of novelty, sustainability or understanding Indigenous cuisines. Or reframe the food by relating it to an aspirational identity, such as being an adventurous eater.
Perhaps most radical of all is the possibility of finding enjoyment in our negative reactions to food. Much as people can take pleasure in horror films or rollercoasters, there’s a kind of pleasure – paradoxical as it might seem – in negative aesthetic experiences like fear, discomfort, maybe even disgust. Food is, after all, a form of entertainment. Today’s diners seek out far-flung restaurants and obscure, hard-to-attain experiences; in the past, elaborate feasts and banquets were designed to surprise, thrill and even frighten guests. Discomfort can push us beyond our comfort zones; embracing the identity of an adventurous eater can help reposition foods: not so much ‘disgusting’ as ‘challenging’ or ‘adventurous’. Anyone who has experienced the thrill of swallowing that first raw oyster will be familiar with the sensation of conquering food fear.
More than a decade after encountering that first article on ‘in vitro meat’, I found myself in a studio apartment in Manhattan, having my own thrilling experience with that least thrilling of foods: chicken. I stood over the stove, looking at an apparently unremarkable package of shredded chicken. Unremarkable, unless you count the fact that said chicken was produced entirely from cells grown in a bioreactor: chicken without the chicken. As the chicken cooked, I listened to it sizzle and watched it brown. The future of food might be this: a new technology that recreates our most familiar foods. It might be a return to the foods we ate millennia ago. But whatever it is, it won’t be disgusting.
