The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [182]
Disgust, I understood, is one of the tools humans have evolved to navigate the omnivore’s dilemma. The emotion alerts us to things we should not ingest, like rotten meat or feces. And surely that protective reflex figured in what I was feeling as I beheld these viscera, which no doubt did contain things that could sicken me. The stink in my nostrils was probably the contents of the pig’s intestines, which had split open on the ground, in various stages of digestion and decomposition. So here, I guess, was the “intuitive microbiology” of disgust at work.
But there had to be more to it than that, and later, when I went back and reread Paul Rozin on disgust, I had a better idea of what else might underlie my revulsion. As Rozin has written, most of the things that disgust people universally do come from animals—bodily fluids and secretions, decaying flesh, corpses. This makes meat eating especially problematic, which might explain why cultures have more rules and taboos governing the eating of meat than of any other food, rules that specify not only which animals are okay to eat and not, but which parts of those animals and how they must be killed.
Beyond the sanitary reasons for avoiding certain parts and products of animals, these things disgust us, Rozin suggests, because they confront us with the reality of our own animal nature. So much of the human project is concerned with distinguishing ourselves from beasts that we seem strenuously to avoid things that remind us that we are beasts too—animals that urinate, defecate, copulate, bleed, die, stink, and decompose. Rozin tells a story about Cotton Mather, who confided to his journal the powerful revulsion he felt at finding himself urinating alongside a dog. Mather turned his self-disgust into a resolution of self-transcendence: “Yet I will be a more noble creature; at the very time when my natural necessities debase me into the condition of the beast, my spirit shall (I say at that very time!) rise and soar.”
Exactly why we would strive so hard to distance ourselves from our animality is a large question, but surely the human fear of death figures in the answer. What we see animals do an awful lot of is die, very often at our hands. Animals resist dying, but, having no conception of death, they don’t give it nearly as much thought as we do. And one of the main thoughts about it we think is, will my own death be like this animal’s or not? The belief, or hope, that human death is somehow different from animal death is precious to us—but unprovable. Whether it is or is not is one of the questions I suspect we’re trying to answer whenever we look into the eyes of an animal.
From the moment I laid eyes on my animal straight through to the moment Angelo sawed off her head her eyes remained tightly shut beneath her disconcerting eyelashes, yet everything else about the episode asked me to confront these kinds of questions. What disgusted me about “cleaning” the animal was just how messy—in every sense of the word—the process really was, how it forced me to look at and smell and touch and even to taste the death, at my hands, of a creature my size that, on the inside at least, had all the same parts and probably looked an awful lot like I did. Such an encounter is no doubt more disturbing to someone who, like me, lacks the religious certainty that humans have souls and animals don’t, period. The line between human and animal that I could discern here was nowhere near that sharp. Cannibalism is one of the things that most deeply disgusts us, and while this isn’t by any reasonable definition that, you could forgive the mind for being fooled into reacting as if it were—in disgust.
Here, I decided, was one of the signal virtues of hunting: It puts large questions about who we and the animals are, and the nature of our respective deaths, squarely before the hunter, and while I’m sure there are many hunters who manage to avoid their gaze, that must take some doing. As Ortega writes in his Meditations, hunting plunges