Getting emotional about mayo
by Ari Levaux
The emotion of disgust can be triggered by many things, including politicians, certain sexual practices and even one’s favorite sports team. But in the literal sense, disgust is a food-related emotion. The word breaks down into the components dis-(bad) and -gust (taste). But disgust turns out to be a bit more complicated than simply a bad taste. A bitter food might just taste really bad, without being disgusting. A fried grasshopper, conversely, might taste good until the eater learns what he’s consuming. There is also a social component to disgust. People are keenly aware when others in the vicinity are disgusted.
Lovers of mayonnaise are acutely aware of this. By reading the cues of my dining companions as I cheerfully dollop a spoonful on my stir-fry, it’s clear who’s disgusted by the special cream.
Graduate research in 2012 by Laura Kushner at American University examined the reactions of volunteers to 27 foods known to elicit disgust. According to Kushner’s dissertation, Food for Thought: The Role of Texture in the Disgust Response, of all the foods used in the study, mayonnaise was tied for first, along with overripe bananas, among foods people would not ingest. Twenty-nine of her 98 subjects refused to eat mayonnaise. Mayo was also the most common elicitor that subjects refused to eat even after previously claiming, in the pre-experiment questionnaire, that they would eat it. But when presented with bare mayo on a cracker, they balked.
According to a recent study in Current Biology, what these mayo deniers are feeling is related to anger. A Glasgow-based team compared facial expressions of subjects as they experienced various emotions, and concluded that disgust stems from the same emotional root as anger, for reasons such as the fact that both emotions are initially expressed with a wrinkled nose. The research, which also concluded that surprise and fear are closely linked, has garnered a lot of buzz.
Speaking as a mayo lover who has felt borderline persecuted for my habit, the idea that people are angry at my mayo resonates. But not everyone is sold on the anger/disgust hybrid emotion. Paul Rozin, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, is a renowned authority on disgust. He’s not on board with the idea that facial comparisons conclusively link anger and disgust, telling me via email he’s, “doubtful on the face of it (no pun intended). Disgust is a withdrawal emotion and anger is an approach emotion.”
Rozin was part of a team that created a modern definition of disgust, which boils down to “revulsion at the prospect of oral incorporation of an offensive substance.” In a book chapter, “Disgust: the body and soul emotion in the 21st century,” Rozin and colleagues wrote: “foods and body products are the core disgust elicitors, the elicitors for which the brain was most directly shaped by natural selection, probably to avoid biological pathogens.”
Disgust elicitors often exhibit a quality, in the eyes of the disgusted, called contagion, where the elicitor’s proximity can contaminate previously untainted material. “You don’t want it on your plate, even though it’s not touching your food. You don’t want to even look at it,” explained Marcia Pelchat, of the Monell Chemical Senses Center, by phone. This was borne out, in the case of mayo, by Laura Kushner’s graduate work. Many of those who declined to eat mayo also refused to eat a cracker that had previously touched mayo, and were even reluctant to nibble a part of the cracker that hadn’t.
The notion that disgust is a means by which we avoid pathogens is sometimes referred to as the “disease hypothesis” of disgust. In his book Taste Matters, John Prescott, an experimental psychologist specializing in food perception and preferences, wrote: “(T)he disease hypothesis seeks to explain that signals of disease – and especially textural cues, whether visceral, tactile or auditory, that accompany disease or contamination – should be the best elicitors of disgust. So, for example, visible signs of disease may involve changes to skin texture. Thus sores are often associated with moist secretions that might suggest the type of slimy or soft textures that can be associated with disgust in foods.”
Or, as Marcia Pelchat observed, “If you were going to make fake pus, what would you use?”
Along these lines, Rozin told me by email that mayonnaise “is gooey, and that tends to split people into likers and dislikers, with few in the middle, as (with) oysters.”
All of this slimy pus talk, with regard to mayo, is almost making me reconsider my next dollop, but this unfamiliar feeling doesn’t feel much like anger. Nausea, considered an extension of disgust, doesn’t seem angry either.
Interestingly, while Rozin doesn’t buy the newly proposed relationship between anger and disgust, he has compared disgust to other emotions that on the surface seem a bit anger-like. “Among emotions, disgust is perhaps closest to contempt,” he wrote in the above-cited book chapter. “Disgust and shame is another pair of related emotions. In one perspective, disgust is an other-directed moral emotion, and shame is a similar but more self-directed emotion.”
Rozin believes the avoidance behaviors related to disgust have morphed into avoidance of other perceived threats, including threats to our identity.
“Humans display in most cultures a strong desire to be seen as qualitatively distinct from other animals, that is, to be “more than animals.” Disgust is in the service of this desire by causing us to recoil from reminders of our animal nature.”
If mayo is really an uncomfortable reminder of our animal nature, I could actually understand the anger part. People can get quite pissed when you tell them what they are. I happen to think mayo is the highest expression of human culinary potential. Man the mayo maker. And if it brings out the animal in me, don’t be mad. n