Book Review: Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal

I first became aware of Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal by Mary Roach via a 5 Minutes For Books review. It caught my eye since I have some…digestive issues, shall we say, so I put it on hold at the library. It took several weeks for it to come in, and then I couldn’t renew it because someone else had placed a hold on it, so it must be pretty popular right now.

I had thought I might just read the chapters I was most interested in and skim through the rest, but Mary’s engaging style drew me in from the first with her insatiable sense of curiosity and droll sense of humor.

However, the book is not so much an explanation of all the organs involved in digestion, how they work, how they interact with each other, and what can go wrong along the way, though there is some of that: it’s more a “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” of weird cases (like William Beaumont’s experiments with a wounded woodsmen named Alexis St. Martin who had been shot but was left with a hole in both his side and his stomach. Beaumont would tie food to string and dip it in the hole and see what happened, plus take gastric juices out to experiment with) or the searching out of questions that you likely won’t find anywhere else (Why doesn’t the stomach digest itself? Can mealworms eat their way out of a predator’s stomach? Can a person die from constipation?)

I’m not sure why the author made the choices she did in some chapters. There is a whole chapter on the rectum primarily concerned with things people put there that it was not meant for (smuggled drugs, prison contraband, etc.). There is a whole chapter about dog food testing, but it was interesting to learn that markets tend to gravitate to customers wishes in absurd ways: for instance, people think grains and vegetables are more healthy that meats, so they want their dog food made out of them, but dogs don’t eat grains and vegetables, so manufacturers have to experiment with coatings that are appetizing to dogs. So what customers end up with is a pile of chemicals that seem and sound natural but obviously are not, while some of them would cringe at the thought of giving their dog a piece of meat, especially raw meat, which is natural for dogs.

Mary goes all over the world to visit mostly various scientists but also Eskimos, prisoners, rabbis, and murderers to discuss various issues relating to digestive organs. She often actively participates (taste-testing, placing her arm in a cow’s stomach, undergoing a test for sniffers of olive oil, attending a fecal transplant – yes, there is such an procedure.)

Being from a secular viewpoint, of course there were many things in the book Christians would not agree with. The author credits evolution with the wonders of the human body rather than God’s creativity and intelligence and spends a great part of one chapter trying to prove that Jonah could not have survived being swallowed by a whale (that’s why it would be considered a miracle, like a virgin conceiving a child or feeding 5,000+ people with a small lunch of bread and fish.) She seems to have a generally negative attitude toward the Bible. There are a handful of instances of the “s word” when a more acceptable synonym would have served just as well and a couple of instances of totally unnecessary vulgarity.

But if one can, not excuse, but look past those objections, the book is pretty interesting. It’s not what I’d recommend if someone wanted to study out the digestive organs or processes completely (I didn’t find the particular information I was interested in), but if one wants to study some of the history of digestive research and a lot of fascinating, if sometimes gross, information, this book is an entertaining way to do so.

(This will also be linked to Semicolon‘s Saturday Review of Books.)