In the spring of 2019, Arthur De Meyer, a twenty-nine-year-old Belgian journalist, toured the Disgusting Food Museum, in Malmö, Sweden. As with the Museum of Sex, in New York City, and the Museum of Ice Cream, in San Francisco, the Disgusting Food Museum is conceptually closer to an amusement park than to a museum. There are eighty-five culinary horrors on display—ordinary fare and delicacies from thirty countries—and each tour concludes with a taste test of a dozen items. De Meyer, the son of a cookbook author and a food photographer, told me that he’d always been an adventurous eater. As a reporter, he also prided himself on his ability to maintain his composure. “But the taste test was war,” he said. “The kind where you’re defenseless, because the bombs are going off invisibly, inside of you.”
An Icelandic shark dish, called hákarl, was the first assault on his stomach. “Eating it was like gnawing on three-week-old cheese from the garbage that had also been pissed on by every dog in the neighborhood,” he said. Next up was durian, a spiky, custard-like fruit from Southeast Asia that “smelled like socks at the bottom of a gym locker, drizzled with paint thinner.” But worst of all was surströmming, a fermented herring that is beloved in northern Sweden. De Meyer said that eating it was like taking a bite out of a corpse.
He vomited ten times, topping the museum’s previous record of six. Mercifully, admission tickets are printed on airplane-style barf bags.
The Disgusting Food Museum, which opened in 2018, is the brainchild of Samuel West, a forty-seven-year-old psychologist who was born in California and has lived in Sweden for more than two decades. In 2016, during a trip to Zagreb, Croatia, he wandered into the Museum of Broken Relationships. As he studied the remnants of strangers’ failed romances—photos of hookup spots; a diet book that a woman received from her fiancé—West came up with an idea for a museum dedicated to failed business products and services. A year later, in Helsingborg, Sweden, he opened the Museum of Failure, where the takeaway was simple: blunders are the midwives of success. One example on display at the museum was the Newton, a personal digital assistant released by Apple in 1993. Its shoddy handwriting software and exorbitant price nearly torpedoed the entire company, but its sleek black design eventually inspired the iPhone. The exhibits also included Bic for Her, a line of pens, from 2011, that were designed for women; DivX, a 2003 trademark for “self-destructing” DVDs that could be watched for only forty-eight hours; a collection of Harley-Davidson perfumes, from the mid-nineties; and Trump: The Game, a Monopoly ripoff released in 1989. (The game was pulled from shelves after Trump said that it was “too complicated.”)
The Museum of Failure was a resounding commercial success, attracting visitors from across the world and attention from the Times, the Washington Post, and National Geographic. By 2018, though, West was on to his next project, after reading an article about how reducing beef consumption could slow climate change. The piece explained that a dire problem could be eased by a simple solution—eating insects, a good source of protein—but that the First World had rejected this idea out of disgust. West realized that if the experience of failure had expedited human innovation, then the experience of disgust was potentially holding us back. Could that aversion be challenged or changed? “I just wanted to know, Why is it that even talking about eating certain things makes my skin crawl?” he told me, animatedly, over Zoom.
The planning for the museum began with a more basic question: What counts as food? West recruited his friend Andreas Ahrens, a former I.T. entrepreneur and a foodie, to help him choose which items would qualify for exhibition. The men ruled out artificially flavored gag gifts—such as Rocket Fizz’s barf soda and Jelly Belly’s booger jelly beans—and novelty foods like deep-fried Oreos and a Polish beer that had been brewed with a woman’s vaginal yeast. Four hundred items made it through the initial screening, after which they were culled based on four criteria: taste, texture, smell, and the process by which they were made. Foie gras “failed” the taste, texture, and smell tests, which is to say that West and Ahrens found it inoffensive on those fronts. But the dish, which is typically produced by force-feeding ducks until their livers swell to ten times their normal size, easily passed the process test, earning itself a place at the museum. (According to Ahrens, many visitors, after reading about the process, swear to never eat foie gras again.) The winnowing of the foods was spirited and combative. West emerged as the bigger wimp; he threw up so many times that he lost count. Ahrens found plenty of the foods unpleasant, but he got sick only after tasting balut, a Filipino egg-fetus snack that is eaten straight from the shell—feathers, beak, blood, and all.
After the men chose the items, they had to contend with customs and transportation. Svið, a traditional Icelandic dish in which a sheep’s head is cut in half and boiled, was impossible to procure, for “logistical reasons,” Ahrens said. The food is instead represented by a photo of the head next to helpings of mashed potatoes and pureed root vegetables. The same goes for ortolan, a nearly extinct French songbird, which is prepared by blinding the bird and then drowning it in brandy, a practice that is now banned in the European Union. Raw monkey brain, which was supposedly served at Chinese imperial banquets, is represented by a type of wooden table that would have been used to hold down a live monkey while the top of its head was sliced open and spooned out. (“It is unclear whether it’s an urban legend, or something that’s still being served in China,” an accompanying sign says.)
Even the foods that appear at the museum in their real forms posed unusual difficulties. To make cuy, a Peruvian dish, West had to watch several YouTube videos on how to skin and boil a guinea pig. “I sent my wife and children away the day I did it,” he recalled. “It just felt wrong, bordering on criminal.” For a South Korean wine that demanded the “fresh turds” of children, Ahrens found himself scooping up his eight-year-old daughter’s excrement and fermenting it with rice wine. The final product is on display at the museum, in a gallon jug, though Ahrens has not mustered the will to try it.
On Tripadvisor, the Disgusting Food Museum is ranked No. 1 on a list of ninety-four things to do in Malmö, the third-largest city in Sweden. Visitors are often surprised to find that the museum is situated on the first floor of a shopping mall, between a furniture store and an art gallery. Daniela Nusfelean, a Romanian college student who visited the museum in January, said that one of the first things she noticed was the absence of any odor. “This place is supposed to have so much food,” Nusfelean remembered thinking. “How can food not smell?”
The stinkier items are secured under bell jars, Ahrens, the museum’s director, said, when he gave me a tour over Zoom, earlier this year. Most foods, such as kale pache—an Iranian soup made from a sheep’s head and hooves, which are boiled overnight to eliminate any smells—were displayed in bowls or pots that sat atop a series of white tables, illuminated by long-necked lamps. (Some of the foods are made fresh every week; others, like the poop wine, have a lengthy shelf life.) The museum, whose walls were bright and bare, looked as sterile as a science lab, until Ahrens, who wore a T-shirt that bore the museum’s logo and the word “Yuck!,” gestured to a chalkboard that read “2 days since last vomit.” “This is the scoreboard,” he said, grinning.
We went on to the exhibits, each of which was accompanied by a placard that, in English and Swedish, noted a dish’s history and its country of origin. First stop: dried stinkbugs from Zimbabwe, which vaguely resembled the buds of microgreen sprouts. Then there was kungu cake (East Africa), a dessert made from millions of crushed flies; fried locusts (Israel), the only insect that the Torah considers kosher; frog juice (Peru), a frothy green beverage containing frogs and quail eggs; and mouse wine (China), a jug of rice wine infused with two hundred baby rodents.
Eventually, Ahrens led me to a Warhol-esque wall of yellow and red cans. “Our most popular selfie destination,” he said, adding that the cans, which were full of surströmming, the fermented herring, had induced more vomiting than any other item in the museum. (“Surströmming is one of the worst smelling foods in the world,” a placard read.) The exhibit featured a smell jar, inviting visitors to lift the lid and to take a sniff. Before the pandemic, one of the highlights of the museum was a photo booth that sprayed jet streams of various scents—durian, stinky tofu (a fermented bean-curd dish)—and captured visitors’ facial expressions as they inhaled. “Instagram,” Ahrens explained.
The term “disgust” entered the English language more than four hundred years ago, from the Old French word desgouster, meaning “to put off one’s appetite.” But disgust wasn’t considered worthy of scientific examination until 1872, when Charles Darwin defined it as a reaction to “something revolting, primarily in relation to the sense of taste . . . and secondarily to anything which causes a similar feeling, through the sense of smell, touch and even of eyesight.” Darwin theorized that disgust is a basic human emotion—like anger, fear, or sadness—and that it is expressed with a universal “disgust face.” If you are presented with a glass of sour milk, you will almost certainly scrunch up your nose, purse your lips, and blow out air between them, making an “ack” or “ugh” sound through clenched teeth. If you are forced to drink the milk, you might open your mouth wide, tense your brows, and retract your upper lip to decrease inhalation, pinching your features into the likeness of the vomit-face emoji (all of which is often a precursor to the act itself).
There is a reason that we find certain foods offensive. A prehistoric human who scarfed down decomposing meat or bacteria-ridden feces wouldn’t have lived long. “Life would have been simpler if we were koala bears,” Daniel Fessler, an evolutionary anthropologist at U.C.L.A., told me. Koala bears eat only eucalyptus leaves, so there isn’t a lot of hand-wringing about what’s for dinner. But humans have made it a lot further in life than koalas, in large part because of our diet. Eating meat has allowed our digestive tracts to shrink and our brains to grow in outsized proportion to our bodies, because the animals we consume have already extracted the nutrients we need. Meat consumption, however, has also entangled our species in the omnivore’s dilemma: we must be flexible enough to consume a variegated diet, yet wary enough of novelty to avoid accidental death.
Evolutionary psychologists often cite the Swiss Army knife as an analogy for the mind, because both have all-purpose tools designed to cope with an unpredictable world. Disgust is simply one blade of many. If the blade is kept sharp, it helps you avoid disease, but if it becomes too sharp you might not ingest enough calories. “Evolution has optimized this trade-off so that priority is placed on the more urgent goal,” Fessler said. If you’re starving, then the blade is dulled: you may be more likely to eat something that you’d otherwise find disgusting, such as rotting leftovers. (As Cervantes wrote in “Don Quixote,” “Hunger is the best sauce.”) “The key point here is that people do not need to make conscious decisions about these trade-offs,” Fessler said. Evolved psychological mechanisms do the work.
Disgust may have originated as a food-rejection system, Paul Rozin, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, told me, “but it has expanded into a vehicle for perceiving the social and moral world.” Rozin is the pioneer of a subfield called disgust studies. His favorite experiment involves dropping a cockroach into a glass of juice. Most people, of course, refuse to drink the juice, citing the dirtiness of cockroaches. “What’s amazing is that even if you disinfect the cockroach and convincingly demonstrate that the juice is harmless, people still won’t want to drink it,” Rozin said. The juice has been irrevocably contaminated.
The concept of contamination is one example of how biology maps onto cultural systems. Both Islam and Judaism forbid the consumption of pork; many cultures avoid other kinds of meat. These taboos may have been provoked by disgust (pigs are thought to be unclean, raw meat tends to be slimy and unappetizing, and both can cause disease if prepared incorrectly), but disgust can also be perpetuated by taboos. Lebanese Christians are technically allowed to eat pork, but many of them abstain, owing to the influence of their pork-avoidant neighbors in the Muslim-majority country.
Like a regional dialect or a style of dress, most food taboos advertise and affirm membership within a group. Humans evolved in tribes, and food taboos helped to define coalitions. In a Hobbesian past, a cohesive tribe would have had a better chance of domination. Chimps know this just as well as high-school cliques do. A show of strength intimidates the loners—by making them feel like losers. It’s not an accident that minorities with unfamiliar customs can pique our suspicion, Mark Schaller, a social psychologist at the University of British Columbia, told me. Our behavioral immune system, much like our biological immune system, is meant to detect danger. But it can go into overdrive. Schaller compared it to a smoke detector. “It’s designed to be hypersensitive for a reason,” he said. “In the wild, it’s O.K. to make small errors by overestimating a threat, but, if you underestimate, you are dead.”
When I was a child in Chongqing, in the nineteen-eighties, food forged the rules and the language of existence. To be fed was to be loved, and to live was to taste the world. (In Chinese, the character for “life” contains the component word “tongue.”) I grew up on an Army compound—my mother was in the military—and the adults I knew had a habit of pinching the round bums of young children, appraising them as “great juicy cuts of meat for dumplings.” Many of those adults, my father included, had lived through the worst famine in history, during which some villagers had cannibalized one another. When I wondered, at the age of four, if human flesh tasted like pork, it did not occur to me that the thought might be disgusting.
As a young Army recruit, my mother ate the rats that scurried outside the granary she guarded, and for years she ate kernels of rice that she found on the ground—something I was told by other adults never to do. To be the first member of my family spared the pangs of hunger was to live through an epochal transition that felt like cultural transformation. Still, the threat of deprivation hung over our lives like the dangling carcasses in the village wet markets.
At those markets, my mother traded her extra grain coupons—which she began to receive after becoming an Army doctor—for eggs, an expensive protein in the hierarchy of foods. Shortly before I began first grade, my mother stopped feeding me the rice porridge and the pickles that she and my grandmother ate every morning and started me on a special breakfast of what she called “brain foods”: a warm, viscous puddle of milk, bobbing with chunks of raw egg yolk. My Swiss Army knife was already being honed. Disgust welled up in me, but it contended with other blades that were necessary for survival: the shame of ingratitude, and the fear of disobedience. I ate the brain foods every morning for two interminable years.
Even so, disgust did not leave a lasting mark on my psyche until 1992, when, at the age of eight, on a flight to America with my mother, I was served the first non-Chinese meal of my life. In a tinfoil-covered tray was what looked like a pile of dumplings, except that they were square. I picked one up and took a bite, expecting it to be filled with meat, and discovered a gooey, creamy substance inside. Surely this was a dessert. Why else would the squares be swimming in a thick white sauce? I was grossed out, but ate the whole meal, because I had never been permitted to do otherwise. For weeks afterward, the taste festered in my thoughts, goading my gag reflex. Years later, I learned that those curious squares were called cheese ravioli.
Olives were another mystery. In Chongqing, I had been introduced to them as a fig-like snack, dried or cured, that had a sweet-tart kick. In the U.S., I placed a dark-green drop onto my tongue and, for the first time in my life, spat something out of my mouth and into my palm. Salty and greasy weren’t what I was expecting, and my reaction was born as much of disgust as it was of having been deceived.
To be a new immigrant is to be trapped in a disgusting-food museum, confused by the unfamiliar and unsettled by the familiar-looking. The firm, crumbly white blocks that you mistake for tofu are called feta. The vanilla icing that tastes spoiled is served on top of potatoes and is called sour cream. At a certain point, the trickery of food starts to become mundane. Disgusting foods become regulars in the cafeteria, and at the dinner table.
Recently, I joined a few Asian-American friends at a restaurant in Queens to have hot pot, a fondue-like communal meal in which ingredients are dipped in a shared pot of boiling broth at the center of the table. By the time I arrived, bowls of sliced pig arteries, pig intestines, cow stomach, duck feet, and pale-pink brains of unidentified provenance already sat around a burbling vat of broth, spices, and chili oil. All of these would have made it into a Westerner’s encyclopedia of disgusting foods, but everyone at the table knew that the gusto with which we consumed the entrails and viscera connected us.
I asked my companions if they’d had any memorable encounters with disgusting food. Nearly all of them named dairy products that they had tried for the first time in the United States. A Chengdu native recalled the chalky taste of a protein shake, making the classic disgust face as she spoke. “The first time I had pizza was bad,” Alex, a forty-year-old network engineer, said. It was margherita pizza, and he thought that the little white splotches of melted burrata were fresh vomit. “I couldn’t believe that there were people who ate this regularly,” he continued. “But Americans told me this was a very common food here.” He bit into the muscled leg of a bullfrog.
“And?” I asked.
“And I just learned to get used to it.”
I had had almost the exact same experience with a Sicilian slice some three decades before. Assimilating requires you to adopt a foreign tongue, in more ways than one. But when the choice is between annihilation and assimilation, you assimilate. This was as true for prehistoric humans as it is for a young, deracinated Chinese immigrant in America. One of the wonders of the tongue is its sheer malleability. New tastes are acquired and seamlessly incorporated into the tapestry of one’s gastronomic predilections. I don’t remember the exact moment when I began relishing Western olives, but the change felt natural; with each new experience, the tapestry is rewoven.
Shortly before my virtual tour of the Disgusting Food Museum, I had received a temperature-controlled package in the mail. It contained goat-stomach cheese, fermented shark, surströmming, and several other items from the museum’s taste test. I arranged the food in small saucers around my laptop and launched Zoom, where Andreas Ahrens was waiting for me. Before I dug in, he suggested I check that the items had made it through their transatlantic journey O.K. “Maybe smell them just to make sure they haven’t gone bad,” he said. But, wait, I said, weren’t most of them supposed to smell bad? He laughed. “Good luck, then.”
I opened a pouch of German sauerkraut juice. Its putrid gray color reminded me of stagnant gutter water. By way of encouragement, Ahrens said, “Very few people try nothing. Most try more than they thought they would.” I had skipped lunch to prepare for the taste test, and by then my stomach was growling so loudly that I felt obliged to apologize to the screen.
The juice tasted cool and refreshing—a blend of pickles and kimchi. Next was bagoong, a Filipino fermented shrimp, which tasted so much like a beloved Chinese fish sauce that I was tempted to spoon it over some leftover rice. Things started getting real with hákarl, the Icelandic shark. My head cocked back at the taste of ammonia, but the chewy texture reminded me pleasantly of squid. I moved on to the insects, beginning with grasshoppers from Oaxaca, Mexico, which had been marinated with dried chilies. They were delicious—crispy, sour, and spicy, like lime-tossed tortilla chips. A bag of dehydrated mixed bugs contained mole crickets and sago worms. The hardest part was knowing that you were eating something that you last saw crawling on the bathroom floor. Crunchiness, I discovered, was a crucial factor in palatability; the crickets could have passed for salty granola. The worms, which looked like deformed prunes, were denser and nuttier. Everything tasted considerably better than it looked.
While I sniffed and chewed, periodically watching my features contort onscreen, I couldn’t help but think of De Meyer, the hapless Belgian. My lack of disgust felt like cheating. The Chinese pidan, for example—a clay-preserved egg with a swampy blue-green hue—has been one of my comfort foods since childhood. The thought of stinky tofu makes me salivate. Durian was more complicated. I don’t like its smell, which some describe as a mix of turpentine and onions, but I’ve eaten enough durian-flavored desserts to reflexively separate the fruit’s odor from its taste, which is simultaneously creamy, sweet, and savory—like chives, garlic, and caramel, blended into a butter.
It was time to try the surströmming, which Ahrens had packed in a vacuum-sealed bag. I used a teaspoon to scoop out a moist, grayish morsel. It was so salty that it tasted bitter. But it was the smell—of rotten eggs brined in raw sewage—that made me jerk my body back like Keanu Reeves dodging bullets in “The Matrix.” The fish’s scent is so foul, Ahrens told me, that a German man was once evicted from his building after leaving surströmming in the stairwell to annoy his neighbor, with whom he was engaged in a petty dispute. (The man sued his landlord, but a judge ruled in favor of the eviction, stating that “the disgusting smell of the fish brine far exceeded the degree that fellow-tenants in the building could be expected to tolerate.”) Ahrens said that, of all the items in the taste test, he’d found the smell of surströmming the most objectionable. The fact that the two of us—a Swede and a Chinese-American—more or less aligned on this pleased me. Disgust, at least in this instance, seemed to unify rather than divide.
The final item was Lakkris Djöflar, a type of salmiak, or salty licorice candy, that is popular in Nordic countries. Easy, I thought. I don’t love licorice, but its herbal taste reminds me of the medicinal soups that my mother fed me as a child. One second after I put the candy in my mouth, though, I spat it out with such force that it left a sticky mark on my screen, where Ahrens’s mouth was curled into a smile.
There was a bowl of the vile confection on his countertop. He ate two, emitting a satisfied “Mmm” as he chewed. “It’s one of my favorite things,” he said.
“But isn’t it horribly salty and bitter?” I asked, incredulous, clutching my glass of water. When the candy was in my mouth, I’d felt as if I were drowning in brackish seawater.
“That’s what makes it good,” he said. “People naturally like foods they grew up eating.”
After finishing the taste test, I called up De Meyer. It had been two years since his visit to the museum, and from what I could tell via Zoom—he was slouched on a sofa, chain-smoking Camels—it looked like he had mostly recovered from the experience. “I feel lucky that I was able to go,” he told me. It had been “refreshing” to be taken out of his comfort zone, even if it had involved going through a dozen barf bags.
After a pause, he recounted how he’d recently cooked onions in a miso-butter glaze for his six-year-old niece. “She hated it the first time,” he said. But he kept encouraging her to try it, telling her that it wasn’t weird, and, by the fourth bite, she was fully on board. “That’s why it was a privilege to go to the museum,” he said. “It takes ten tries for people to like something new. But, if you don’t start somewhere, how else would you expand your reference point? How else would my niece learn that she loves miso butter?”
Ahrens’s goal is to replicate such experiences on a large scale. He recently took over the Disgusting Food Museum, and, later this year, he will open two more locations, in Bordeaux and Berlin, that will feature site-specific exhibits, such as Berliner schnitzel made from cow udders.
The museum in Malmö has been mostly well received by tourists, but it also has numerous critics, who have accused it of cultural insensitivity and, in some cases, of outright racism. In 2018, the L.A. Times columnist Lucas Kwan Peterson argued that the museum reinforces prejudices by oversimplifying the customs of other countries and reducing their foods to clichés. A museum’s use of the word “disgusting” in its name implies an endorsement of the term, he wrote.
When I asked Ahrens about his use of the word “disgusting,” and whether he’d considered using a different name for the new museums, he nodded. “ ‘Disgusting’ is a controversial word, but if we used ‘unusual’ or ‘strange’ it’s just not the same,” he said.
“ ‘Disgusting’ calls attention to itself,” I said.
“Exactly,” he replied. “And we are a museum that relies on public support. That is how we survive.”
As Peterson wrote, “The museum is trying to have it both ways—poking the bear, then backing away, hands raised innocently.” Even those who believe in the museum’s statement of purpose question whether it can be put into practice. The trouble with cultural institutions, Casey R. Kelly, the author of “Food Television and Otherness in the Age of Globalization,” said, is that those who run them can’t always control what’s being communicated. “On the one hand, the museum is introducing visitors to new foods,” he said, “but, on the other, there’s a cosmopolitan sanitization process at work,” in which foods are being stripped of their cultural context and then presented at a museum that keeps track of how many people they make vomit.
At the Disgusting Food Museum, I felt both like a tourist and like one of the exhibits. Twenty-nine of the eighty-five dishes on display are Asian, and twelve are from China. Despite Ahrens’s reminder that Asia is underrepresented at the museum compared with its population, seeing stinky tofu, century eggs, and other staples of my childhood branded as “disgusting” stung me with self-consciousness. Those foods were in my fridge at that very moment. Turtle soup and dog meat, also among the exhibits, were dishes that I’d eaten in Chongqing; though I’d likely never revisit them, I knew them well enough as communal holiday fare. Meanwhile, mouse wine, monkey brain, and virgin-boy eggs (eggs boiled in young boys’ urine) were as foreign to me as surströmming. Ahrens and West’s decision to categorize them all under “China” felt simultaneously alienating and reasonable: the Westerner in me understood the urge not to differentiate them, while the Chinese rebelled at the notion that they would ever belong together.
Just as Michelangelo’s David represents the height of the Italian Renaissance, and cobalt porcelain the cultural apogee of the Ming dynasty, the exhibits at the Disgusting Food Museum, divided as they are by geography, perform an act of synecdoche, with the foods standing in for individual places or peoples. This makes sense as a method of cataloguing exhibits, but it can obviate the obvious: foods in the pre-modern era were often disgusting—at least to the uninitiated palate—but they were also ingenious. Why is hákarl the token food of Iceland? The Vikings wanted a way to eat sleeper sharks, which are plentiful but poisonous; consequently, they invented a technique for purifying the two-thousand-pound beasts.
When food is available only to a select few, it becomes a symbol for one’s social position. The reason that the French aristocracy once ate ortolans is probably similar to the reason that monkey brains would have been served at royal banquets in China. Across cultures, the élite gravitate toward foods that are inaccessible to the masses, owing to price, scarcity, or difficulty of preparation. It was in part the pursuit of “exotic” spices that led to Western conquests in Africa and East Asia, which in turn created asymmetries of power that surface in the modern sociological concept of “taste,” or in a worldly palate informed by various cultural or class-based rituals. (By using the phrase “in good taste,” one invokes the gastronomically satisfying to connote something that is socially sanctioned.)
In the twentieth century, powerful nations seemed to reinvent food by processing the disgust out of it. At the Disgusting Food Museum, the U.S. is represented mostly by calorie-packed, nutritionally deficient snacks, such as Twinkies, Spam, and Pop-Tarts. The element of disgust, as detailed by the museum’s placards, exists largely in the factory farms, the economies of waste, the misuse of growth hormones, and the exploitation it takes to produce these items. Kelly said that Americans are generally uninterested in knowing where their food comes from: “There is entitlement in this willful ignorance—to be in a place where you don’t have to think about how to make the feet and beak of a bird palatable.”
At the beginning of the pandemic, many Americans were suddenly confronted with the threat of food insecurity, as the virus exposed the fragility of our supply chains. Restaurants shuttered, bottled water was rationed, and egg prices rose threefold overnight. I asked Ahrens if his view of disgust or of the museum had changed during the pandemic. (Although Sweden did not shut down, ninety-nine per cent of the museum’s visitors disappeared overnight.) In slow, methodical tones, he spoke to me about the health impact of food. “The more foreign foods I come across, the more I realize how little I know about the food I eat, and the more I want to know,” he said. The museum is planning a temporary exhibit on dangerous foods, in which danger is defined as everything from “poison or toxin, like fungus, to manufacturing errors that cause the end product to be injurious.” What’s dangerous is what we don’t know, Ahrens told me. The horseshoe bat, which early in the pandemic was thought to be responsible for the transmission of the coronavirus in China, will be prominently featured in the exhibit.
Last spring, shortly after Donald Trump referred to COVID-19 as the “China virus,” I received a Twitter message from a stranger. “Y’all Chinese ppl want eat bat soup & alive mice no wonder this coronavirus started y’all dirty asses eating shit wit rabies,” he wrote. “Get the fuck out the us go back to China with the rest of y’all eating animals alive ass family members.” This was also when photos of bats began arriving in my social-media in-boxes.
One afternoon, while I was talking on the phone at a grocery store, a passerby, hearing me speak Mandarin, hissed, “Nasty Chinese.” Another day, when I was riding the subway for the first time in months, a man called me a “disgusting Chink” over and over until he reached his station and left the car.
Something happens when you discover that you yourself are “disgusting.” It does not matter whether you believe it to be true. Shame and fear flood your body, as involuntarily as the disgust face, until a kind of self-disgust takes root. The origins of self-disgust have yet to be fully understood, but scientists speculate that the emotion likely arises from the internalization of others’ disgust. It is also a unique form of torture; to be perceived as repugnant is to live inside that repugnance, desperate to expel you from yourself.
“Have Americans always been like this?” my mother’s Chinese health aide, Ying, asked me the other day, as she showed me a news story about yet another unprovoked attack on an elderly Asian woman in Chinatown. Ying was wearing a hat and a mask, not only for COVID safety, she told me, but also because she was anxious about being identified as Asian—an abstract feeling that, in recent weeks, had concretized to an acute fear.
Perhaps this is what terrifies me the most about disgust: its ability to weaponize one’s gut in service of the outlandish. The idea that all Chinese carry the coronavirus because it could have originated from eating bats is risible. But COVID’s invisibility has lent credence to the tribalist notion that disgusting-food-consuming Asians must surely be the ones who are carrying and spreading the virus.
If only nature were so straightforward. In food, funky smells raise an alarm that warns against ingestion; respiratory droplets expelled during a conversation with an asymptomatic carrier of the coronavirus raise no such alarms. Disgust can’t protect us from this particular virus. If anything, it leaves us more vulnerable than we were before. Many people who contract the virus lose their senses of taste and smell. A friend of mine who got COVID in March of 2020 can smell and taste again, but can no longer eat meat. “Hamburgers, ground turkey”—foods that were once staples of her diet—“it’s all become gross,” she told me. Pamela Dalton, an experimental psychologist who studies the interaction between emotion and odor perception, told me that many COVID patients have reported a distortion of their senses of taste and smell while recovering from the virus, resulting in disgusting sensations. “The olfactory system is playing a protective role here,” Dalton said. “It’s not surprising that if parts of the system have gone awry due to COVID the default setting is to turn tastes and smells unpleasant, so as to help us avoid high-risk foods.” Like meat.
If COVID is, in some ways, a failure of disgust, it is also a breeding ground for it. The question—similar to the one that inspired West to open the Disgusting Food Museum—is whether this disgust, particularly as it pertains to other people, can be swallowed for the greater good. Kevin Arceneaux, a political scientist at Temple University, told me, “Your intuition may tell you that the immigrant across the street smells weird, cooks weird food, and therefore does not belong. But we also possess the capacity to reflect and override our intuitions with conscious reason. This second step is harder, but the capacity to do so is also what makes us uniquely human.”
To be disgusted is natural, but to understand why we are disgusted requires us to reconfigure the way we see the world. “Human beings are accustomed to protecting themselves and their own,” Arceneaux said. “But a pandemic is the kind of unprecedented event that requires people to reframe the threat.” The purpose of wearing a mask is not to protect yourself but to protect others around you. “The only way to save yourself from a contagion is to save the strangers who may disgust you,” Arceneaux said.
One day this past winter, when my mother’s nursing facility was locked down, her aide, Ying, turned up on my doorstep with a bag that refused to stay still. A dozen crabs were squirming inside. My mother had told Ying (accurately) that I had been living on ramen and takeout for a while and that I loved steamed crabs, though I almost never cooked them at home. Both of them assumed that this was because I couldn’t deal with the inconvenience, but the truth was more complicated: the prospect of boiling the crabs alive, as my mother had done while I was growing up, disgusted me. Ying would not have understood this. My refusal to accept the food probably would have struck her as callous and rude. I thanked her and took the crabs. “Boil them quickly or they will die and no longer be fresh!” she admonished.
As I stood in my kitchen, a few minutes later, agonizing over what to do, I became aware of my hypocrisy: I was ready to eat the crabs when they were served by someone else, but I was too cowardly to do the killing myself. Still, if I left them in the bag on my kitchen floor, they would die, and I would have squandered Ying’s effort. Reluctantly, I dropped the crabs’ writhing bodies into a pot, covered it with a lid, and turned on the stove. Outside, two ambulances sped by, sirens blaring.
I poured vinegar and chopped ginger and tried to think about anything besides the crustaceans in my kettle. Egocentric pain. This was what evolutionary biologists would call my uneasiness. Our ability to empathize with animals is a function of their phylogenetic proximity to us; we can see the emotions of a dog much more clearly than those of a crab. And yet there was an unbearable scratching and scraping inside the pot—a mad scramble for life.
It occurred to me that what I felt was not disgust with the crabs or with the process but with myself, and what I had the power to do—or not to do. The doomed fight for survival is what the crabs and I had in common. Steam and the smell of the ocean had begun to fill my kitchen when the phone rang. It was Ying, and there was an impossible tenderness in her voice when she asked about the dinner: Had I cooked it yet? ♦
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