The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [68]
It seems just a matter of time. With my trypsin and chymotrypsin bound into submission, my CCK will soar like an eagle, my appetite will plummet like a stone, and my weight will return to 116. Luckily I still have some of the clothing I bought on that blissful day in 1976. But I’ll probably wait until bellbottoms come back into fashion.
October 1991
Sweet Smell of Sex
Male and female created He them.
—GENESIS 1:27
Whenever a female pig (also known as a sow) is in heat and smells a certain musky chemical, or pheromone, in the breath of a male pig (also known as a boar), she shows an immediate, urgent, and uncontrollable reaction. Her hind legs stiffen, her spine curves downward, her ears cock, and she presents herself for mounting. This physical position is known as lordosis, and it is invariably inspired in a sow, without choice or variation, by the scent of a boar’s breath. Since the beginning of time, or at least since I was in high school, man has not flagged in his quest for a substance having the same effect on the female of our species. I cannot count the evenings on which my friends and I cruised around suburban streets in our convertibles, sharing our collection of true stories in which something called Spanish fly played at least a major supporting role. What chemical the girls talked about in their convertibles I cannot say.
These adolescent fantasies are only a dim and distant memory now. But when rumor recently reached me, in the form of an article in the Wall Street Journal, that the Erox Corporation, with headquarters in New York and laboratories in Salt Lake City, may have discovered the human pheromone and bottled it in a perfume, I hastily packed my bags and jetted out to Salt Lake to see if it all was true.
I regret to report that I found very little lordosis in Salt Lake City. I did meet with a group of interesting scientists, learned of some major discoveries in the science of smell, wore two perfumes that may or may not revolutionize the fragrance business, and ate several bags of gourmet saltwater taffy, made with salt from the Great Salt Lake.
A pheromone is a chemical messenger sent by one member of a species to another that is capable of changing the behavior or internal state of the receiver. The most famous pheromones are sexual, like the signals emitted by female moths and butterflies to attract males from as far away as several miles. This talent of the female silkworm moth was discovered in the nineteenth century and attributed at first to some sort of radiation. Finally, in 1959, her signal was identified as the chemical bombykol, emitted by the female and smelled, or at least sensed, by tiny hairs on the male moth’s antennae. This was the first pheromonal puzzle ever solved by human science. In celebration, the word “pheromone” was coined, a compound of the Greek pherein (to carry) and the Greco-English hormone (to excite). It can hardly have been a coincidence that, in the very same year, these now-classic verses soared to the top of the pop charts:
I told her that I was a flop with chicks.
I’ve been that way since Nineteen Fifty Six.
She looked at my palm and she made a magic sign.
She said, “What you need is Love Potion No. 9.”
I didn’t know if it was day or night.
I started kissin’ everything in sight.
But when I kissed the cop down at Thirty Fourth and Vine
He broke my little bottle of Love Potion No. 9.
Sexual pheromones may get the most attention, but the range of chemical signals in the animal kingdom is astonishing. In various species and under a variety of circumstances, pheromones can say, “Here’s the food,” “Let’s you and me fight,” “I’m pregnant,” “Let’s all infest this tree together,” “Let’s form a swarm,” “Our queen is here, so everything’s OK,” “Please follow