This creative-living blog is moving. I've written about creative adventures in art, culture, and travel
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Friday, July 30, 2021
MOVING DAY!
This creative-living blog is moving. I've written about creative adventures in art, culture, and travel
Friday, July 23, 2021
That's Disgusting!
Don't Look!
DON'T LOOK AWAY! I know you might want to, given the title, but read on. It will be interesting and perhaps even fun.
Origins of Disgust
Disgust is one of the worst reactions we can have. Whatever stimulates our disgust reaction, we want none of it! It revolts us, forces us turn away. We want to vomit. Infants show disgust clearly by tightly closed eyes, scrunched face, pursed lips, and agitated head turns away from the offending food. This kind of physical reaction, persists through life. You may be curious about why.
drawing by Janet Strayer |
Disgust begins as an involuntary emotional response, one of several basic emotions we start out with in infancy. Hardwired into our facial expressions, disgust functions to defend us from something objectionable while it also alerts others. Charles Darwin thought it was a universal human reaction to something nauseating, sensed primarily via taste. Disgusted faces look like they want to prevent intake, or promote expulsion of something bad from mouth and nose. Originating in expulsion of food that might endanger our survival, Darwin thought disgust was associated with anything causing a similar reaction via other senses, including vision.
Why Focus on the Disgusting?
charcoal drawing by Janet Strayer, from Caravaggio's Judith cutting the head of Holofernes |
Disgust Merits a Museum.
The Disgusting Food Museum opened in Malmö, Sweden in 2018, and has since travelled worldwide. It challenges the concept of 'taste' quite literally by presenting presumably disgusting foods to eat. Let's explore this a bit --- from a safe distance.
The foods include freshly served, often smelly items native to different regions of the world: poop wine, fish-heads, rancid shark, Spam, stinkbugs, dog meat, kosher fried locusts, and durian (a delicious custardy fruit I ate in Singapore only after months of habituation and only after it's awful smell was altered), also worms and grasshoppers.
People at the Museum try out more foods than they expect they will. Some are reported to taste surprisingly good, if one can get past a pre-formed idea of them. On the other hand, the museum has
also been rebuked as culturally insensitive, even racist. I've not been to this museum so can't speak first-hand to its emphasis or impact. Thinking about it, though, considerations of beauty (or ugliness) across time and cultures are appropriate in art and cultural anthropology, so why not the same for disgust?
Cultural Differences and Biases
I recall years ago being the guest of a friend invited to a very traditional Bedouin wedding. It took place in a beautiful dessert location in the Middle East. I was offered a delicacy in a bowl. My translator friend told me it was a soup containing ungulates' eyeballs. It looked like mucus to me. Minding my manners, I ate some of it. Almost immediately, my gag reflex forced me to exit the scene, accompanied by laughter from my former friend.
How much of the disgust reaction resides in the eye (or idea) of the beholder rather than in the actual stimulus? Was it the soup, itself, or my associations that prompted my reaction?
Going Outside Our Comfort Zone
More Creative Life News
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