Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (53 page)

Metaphorically speaking, of course. Or maybe
not. Because one of the most curious things I learned about the bacteria that give
cheese their aromas is that they are, at least in some cases, closely related to the
bacteria that give us our aromas.
Brevibacterium?
It not only lives in the
salty damp of a washed-rind cheese, but is equally at home in the salty damp under human
arms or between human toes. (I give you “the feet of god.”) Sweat by itself
has no discernible odor; what you think you smell when you smell sweat are the metabolic
by-products of
brevibacteria,
as they busily go about fermenting, well,
you
. And your toes and armpits are not the only bodily zones where such
fermentations are taking place, either.
^*
So it may well be that the
allusiveness of a funky cheese to the human body is actually more
literal than metaphoric, a matter not so much
this stands for that
as
this is that, too,
in food form. What’s going on in certain cheeses
doesn’t just remind us of the body; in some sense it
is
the body, or at
least the fermentations unfolding thereon and -in.

As you might expect, the French are much
more comfortable with these ideas, and these cheeses, than Americans seem to be. In
fact, some Frenchmen regard America’s uneasiness with raw-milk cheeses (which tend
to be more odiferous than cheeses made from pasteurized milk) as further proof of our
puritanism in carnal matters. Pierre Boisard, a French sociologist, celebrates a
raw-milk Camembert as “a living substance produced by an animal organism, [that]
constantly reminds us of the body, of sensual pleasure, of sexual fulfillment, and of
all that is forbidden in it.” Only “hidden Puritanism re-entering through
the backdoor [of] alimentary hygiene”—and
not
the threat from listeria,
say, or salmonella—could possibly explain the American government’s ban on
raw-milk Camembert.
^*

No, I never did float this theory to Sister
Noëlla. Didn’t get the chance. … Okay, actually I could never figure out
quite how to broach it. How
do
you ask a nun whether she believes the
government’s crackdown on raw-milk cheese is rooted in sexual repression?

Though I did ask her, before leaving the
abbey, if she could put me in touch with her friend Jim Stillwaggon, or refer me to any
of his writings. She had described him as a philosopher as well as a cheese maker. Had
he published any of his reflections on sex and death in cheese? Did he have a Web site,
perhaps?

“No, and it’s probably just as
well. I’m just not sure the world is ready for Jim.”

On my drive home, a fragrant chunk of
Sister’s Noëlla’s ripe Saint-Nectaire warming on the seat beside me, I
wondered if the French might be right, and if the disgust we sometimes register at the
smell of a strong cheese is the product of sexual repression—a taboo at work. It does
seem to be the case that the smells of cheese are ripe with the smells of the body,
human or animal. Yet not all of those smells are necessarily sexual in nature. When we
consider “the body,” certainly there is sex to consider, but isn’t
there also death? I also wondered if maybe, on the theory (contra Freud) that sometimes
a cigar is just a cigar, disgust is sometimes just disgust.

When I got home I began to dig around in the
literature of disgust, which in the last several decades has attracted a handful of
interesting thinkers from a wide range of disciplines, including psychology (Paul
Rozin), philosophy (Aurel Kolnai), even law (William Ian Miller). Disgust, I learned, is
one of the primary human emotions; it appears on even the shortest list of human
emotions, and in fact is unique to our species. (Though you do have to wonder, how can
we be so sure?) Darwin, who wrote about disgust in his 1872 book,
The Expression of
the Emotions in Man and Animals
, described it as a reaction to something that
offends our sense of taste (the word comes from the Middle French
desgouster
,
or “distaste”), rooted in the biological imperative to reject foods that
might be dangerous.

Building on Darwin, Paul Rozin writes that
the emotion of disgust originates in “the revulsion at the prospect of oral
incorporation of an offensive object.” Disgust is thus a crucial tool for an
omnivore at constant risk of ingesting toxic substances. But the emotion of disgust has
since been co-opted by other, higher human faculties, such as morality, so that we are
disgusted by certain kinds of morally
offensive behavior. Rozin
writes, “A mechanism for avoiding harm to the body became a mechanism for avoiding
harm to the soul.”

Disgust, as an emotion exclusive to humans,
also helps put distance between us and the rest of nature. It is a crucial component of
the civilizing process. Rozin points out that anything that reminds us that we are in
fact still animals can elicit feelings of disgust. This includes bodily secretions,
^*
sexuality, and death. But for Rozin it is the third term here that is the most
important.

“The prototypical odor of disgust is
the odor of decay,” he points out, “which is the odor of death.” Thus
disgust can be understood as a defense against our fear of death, another emotion that
happens to be unique to our species
^†
Rozin says that people who
score high on psychological tests for “disgust sensitivity” also score high
on tests measuring the fear of death.

Putrefaction is repulsive to us because it
reminds us of our ultimate fate, which is to have the noble and intricate form of our
bodies disintegrate into a suppurating, stinking puddle of formlessness, then to be
returned to the earth as food for the worms. This work of decomposition will be
performed by bacteria and fungi, and the method they will deploy will be fermentation.
Oddly, it is this process of decomposition that disgusts us, not the final result of
that process: Rotting flesh is disgusting, but skeletons are not.

So why should we ever be attracted to the
very processes and products that, for the very good reasons Rozin gives, repulse us?
Surely this is perverse. Yet if disgust is in fact one of the ways humans draw a line
between themselves and the other animals, then to deliberately put ourselves in
situations that elicit disgust may allow us to
underscore and enforce
that distinction. Perhaps we “enjoy” the experience of disgust for the
flattering things the reaction implies about us—the wrinkling of the nose a visible
index of our superiority and refinement.

I became curious to know what Stillwaggon
would have to say on the subject, and in the middle of my journey through the literature
of disgust, I went looking for him online. Something had raised my antennae—didn’t
smell quite right—when Sister Noëlla told me he hadn’t published. Stillwaggon
didn’t sound like a man who could keep his views under a bushel basket even if he
tried. When I searched his name, I found no books or Web sites, but I did find a
Facebook page, and there on its wall a URL. Bingo: In large type the words
“Cheese, Sex, Death and Madness” popped up on my screen, above a photo of an
aproned man stirring a copper vat of milk, next to a photo of a particularly hideous
cheese oozing yellow from its broken crust.
^*

The Web site, half in French and half in
English, was itself an aromatic ferment of truly wild ideas about, well, sex and death
and cheese, which Stillwaggon defined as “nature imperfectly mastered.” This
struck me as a pretty good definition for fermentation in general. (If not for the
entire human enterprise.) He went on to describe cheese as “an incarnate Passion
Play, unfolding in its lifetime (briefer, in general, than our own) all the
characteristics of the newborn, of juvenility and adolescence, of maturity and of
decrepitude.” Cheese was flesh, heir to all its glories and mortifications. On the
home page I clicked on “Attraction & Repulsion” and found this soaring,
overripe, and ungrammatical flight of cheesy exegesis:

“Cheese shares the same ambiguity of
attraction/repulsion which marks and characterizes our genital and anal zones as passage
from
the scrubbed and well-aired exterior toward the organic,
unsurveyed and uncontrolled interior: infernal microcosm fermenting, composting, the
seething haven of impersonal microbiota. …

“In both domains—the cheese and the
sex—we are drawn to the limits of our comfort zone. Both zones of experience therefore
invite us to exceed our limits, to test, to uncover, to abandon our reserve, to
relativize our notions and principles—of limit, of desirable, of good & bad, of
attractiveness and hideousness. The direction of this discovery is from pure and simple
toward impure and complex, from a formal, cared-for aesthetic toward a formlessness, an
aesthetic of abandon and degradation.”

Whew …

Stillwaggon had single-handedly yanked
Dionysus out of the world of wine, where he had been comfortably ensconced for
thirty-five hundred years, and brought him into the world of cheese. (Where,
surprisingly enough, he seemed very much at home.) Stillwaggon and Sister Noëlla shared
large ambitions for the significance of cheese in human affairs, though I could
certainly see why she might not think the world was ready for his writings.
Stillwaggon’s mad Web site achieved a kind of perverse brilliance, accompanied by
a handful of louche cheese photos and the occasional clipping from the French press.
(Including one about a French study of human odor that found that men, when ripe, smell
more like washed-rind cheese than women, who smell more like sauvignon blanc.) But I
found the “Cheese, Sex, Death and Madness” so rhetorically moist and
overheated that I soon clicked out of it. And made my way back to Freud, who had never
before seemed quite so moderate and sane.

True, Freud had nothing specific to say
about cheese, but his thoughts on disgust were illuminating even so. For Freud, disgust
is a “reaction formation” designed to keep us from indulging desires our
civilization has sought to repress. We are drawn to what disgusts
because it is a cover for precisely what most attracts. Freud points out that children
are not in the least disgusted by feces; to the contrary, they’re fascinated by
them. But they learn to be disgusted as part of their socialization. Disgust thus
operates as a kind of deeply internalized taboo against desires civilization needs to
repress.

But taboos are always ripe for breaking,
especially when they can be broken without doing serious harm, to either the individual
or society. A cheese that stinks—of manure, of sex—offers a relatively safe way for us
to flirt with forbidden desires. And even a cheese that stinks of death—one that, like a
ripe Vacherin, has completely disintegrated into a formless ooze—may offer a perverse
sort of pleasure. For, if the final fermentation that awaits us all is too horrible to
contemplate, perhaps a little preview of putrefaction on a cheese plate can, like a
gothic tale or horror movie, give us the little frisson of pleasure that comes from
rehearsing precisely what we most fear.

Freud was surely right to suggest that
disgust is a learned response, mediated by culture. Anthropologists have amply
documented the fact that, although the emotion of disgust is a human universal, the
specific things that elicit disgust in one culture don’t necessarily disgust
people in another. Cheese is the perfect example. Until very recently, most Americans
found strong French cheeses repulsive. When Red Hawk was introduced a decade or so ago,
there was only a handful of washed-rind cheeses made in America. Claude Lévi-Strauss
writes that, after the American troops landed in Normandy in 1944, they destroyed
several of the dairies where Camembert was made because they reeked—of what the troops
assumed had to be corpses. Oops.

Many Asians regard cheese of any kind as
repulsive, and stinky cheeses so disgusting as to be utterly incomprehensible as food.
Lest you conclude that people in Asia have more delicate noses than do we in the West,
consider a few of the East’s own stinking delicacies. The Japanese prize natto,
the stringy, mucilaginous ferment of soybeans that is strongly redolent of garbage. Fish
sauce, used to flavor foods in many Southeast Asian nations, is the liquid secreted by
dead fish that have been allowed to rot under the equatorial sun until they lose any
hint of form and stink magnificently. The Chinese love their “stinky tofu,”
which is made by steeping blocks of tofu in a very old, black ooze of putrefying
vegetable matter. Being far too odiferous to bring indoors, stinky tofu is usually eaten
as a street food, though even out in the open air it can stink up an entire city
block.