My relationship with food has always ended at the point when I swallow, but I never knew that. I discovered this blind spot when I read Mary Roach’s Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal (NY: Norton, 2013). Even though it’s not exactly the paean to taste buds and olfaction that I had imagined when I first picked it up, I still think it’s a great book to include in the pages of Cozy Foodie. I figure we can all benefit from being a little better acquainted with our guts. As Roach points out,

Most of us pass our lives never once laying eyes on our own organs, the most precious and amazing things we own.

She’s talking about literally seeing her ileocecal valve and appendix—a pleasure that I will undoubtedly be introduced to within the next handful of years, but that’s another story—but I think we can also take Roach figuratively. Anyway, the alimentary canals in Mary Roach’s book have vastly more remarkable lives than my own; Gulp unquestionably opened my ileocecal valve to possibilities I had never before imagined.

Seriously, Roach’s writing style is so accessible, witty, and vivid that I would’ve gulped down this book (hehe) regardless of the topic. Maybe I’m easy, because reading lines like, “This leaves milk, say, or chewed peas in peril of being horked out the nostrils,” put me in line for some up-close-and-personal horking. (Yep, I’m 7 years old.) Roach has a great time doing the research for the book, and she has a great time sharing her discoveries with her readers: alongside some pretty interesting biology and cultural commentary, she presents her encounters with keenly observed, humanizing sketches that show off the personalities of the experts she meets. And she turns the magnifying lens on herself, too, such as when she tries out to be an olive oil sensory panelist: trying to taste the bitterness in olive oil, she notes,

I’m doing a mnyeh-mnyeh-mnyeh Bugs Bunny thing with my tongue, but it’s not helping.

There’s a lot in this book that comfortably appeals to a Cozy Foodie, like Roach’s foray into the world of a sensory analyst (“Go left at the smell of simmering hotdogs”), and learning what flavors appeal to our cats and dogs (“Cats, unlike dogs and other omnivores, can’t taste sweetness”). Who knew that most people usually eat no more than about thirty foods, and that they run through them all in four days? It was no surprise to me that there’s a deep, learned cultural basis for what we think is delicious or not—I’ll be the first to admit that some Chinese foods can be… unusual. Fermented bean curd, anyone? But I got a better insight into what this means reading about scientific studies done on babies’ food preferences (55% of children around 2 years old will taste “artfully coiled peanut butter scented with Limburger cheese and presented as ‘dog-doo’ ”!), and about how seemingly unbalanced diets, such as traditional Inuit meat-centric foods, actually are nutritionally well balanced. Then there are head-scratchers like: can someone survive being swallowed alive, à la Jonah and the whale? Sharing the latest tidbit about cross-cultural views on saliva or the science behind Beano may earn you a raised eyebrow if you do it over your bowl of chili con carne, but Roach makes it almost irresistible to want to share.

Admittedly, the eeuw factor in Gulp kept me reading, too. Readers with a fascination for the disgusting will get a gross anatomy lesson unlike anything they ever learned in high school: explosive or noxious flatus and inflammable eructation, autointoxication, internal putrescence, nutrient enemas, autocoprophagia, and megacolons, among other zesty topics, but the hork-worthy and the high-minded are plated up together to create an educational and entertaining whole. Take, for example, Roach on the psychology of biting into crunchy food: is it a “destructive process” that we receive pleasure from, a way to “de-stress,” as an oral processing expert hypothesized (just like the de-stressing done by the main character in Assassin’s Creed, Roach helpfully adds), or does it appeal to us because it is a shorthand signal for freshness, as a food physicist told Roach?

Obviously, for Roach, flavor, texture, and bouquet are only the tip of the iceberg lettuce. I should have guessed when she wrote:

Yes, men and women eat meals. But they also ingest nutrients. They grind and sculpt them into a moistened bolus that is delivered, via a stadium wave of sequential contractions, into a self kneading sack of hydrochloric acid and then dumped into a tubular leach field, where it is converted into the most powerful taboo in human history. Lunch is an opening act.

So have a gander at the black box that is your alimentary canal. De-stress your way through some carrot sticks, then learn and laugh about what happens after their opening act. You’ll never think about bolus the same way again!

Salt is so common, so easy to obtain, and so inexpensive that we have forgotten that from the beginning of civilization until about 100 years ago, salt was one of the most sought-after commodities in human history.

What’s in your refrigerator? Even if some people only use it for storing a bottle of ketchup, left-over pizza, and a six-pack of diet Coke, there is a fridge in practically every American home. Check your pantry: what canned goods are there? Chef-Boyardee, anyone? In Salt: A World History, Mark Kurlansky (New York: Walker) reminds us of the profound impact of these two inventions on our foodways. Before refrigeration and canning became so common as to be invisible, salting was — along with smoking and pickling — among the most common methods of preserving perishable food in most parts of the world. Salt was so valuable that Ancient Romans sometimes paid their soldiers in salt. The origin of the word salary is sal, or salt in Latin, and the expressions to be “worth his salt” and to “earn his salt” came out of this practice.

Sweeping through swaths of world history, Kurlansky details beliefs, production, trade, government policies, military strategy, scientific discoveries, and technological innovations demonstrating salt’s crucial role in human endeavors. The transformation of communities into civilizations depended on their ability to first extend and stabilize their food supply. Civilizations from the Incas to Asian India were founded not only by rivers, but also near places with access to salt. Salt became economically important as communities expanded: though salt, which is relatively bulky, was usually not exported on its own, it was used to preserve food that was then profitably sold. Wars were won or lost depending on an army’s access to salt to make and preserve food, for medicine, and to maintain livestock or horses for cavalry or hauling supplies. In example after example, Kurlansky illustrates how salted foods shaped economies for four millennia, and with economies, also government policies. Even as recently as 1930, Mohandas Gandhi sparked the independence movement in India against British rule by leading a campaign to deliberately break the laws prohibiting local harvesting of salt.

Salts have been used for much more than preserving food. While most of Salt focuses on the use of food salt, Kurlansky touches on the uses of non-food salts. He writes that by the Middle Ages, salts were used to cure leather, clean chimneys, soldering pipes, glazing pottery, and as medicine. Since the start of the Industrial Revolution, the use of salt for food has become less significant compared to its uses for industrial purposes. Kurlansky shows the direct connection from scientific research conducted on salts to new industries. He even connects the inception of the oil and gas industry with salt mining: much of the drilling technology was the same, and oil, gas, or both are frequently found on the edge of salt. Even unused salt mines have found contemporary usage as storage for nuclear waste and emergency oil reserves. Nowadays, the US is the largest producer and consumer of salt, but only 8% is for food, and 51% is for deicing roads, and the remainder is for industrial purposes.

Lest it gets too geeky, Kurlansky seasons the text liberally with historical recipes and instructions for salt-cured foods, from the ancient Roman fish sauce, garum, to artisanal soy sauce crafted by modern-day entrepreneurs in Sichuan, China. The book is a fascinating review of history through a crystalline lens.

I particularly enjoyed Kurlansky’s discussion of salt’s symbolic value: emerging from its ability to preserve and sustain life, Jews, Muslims, and Christians all believed that salt protected infants from evil, but so did disparate peoples from Japan to Haiti. Long linked to fertility in ancient societies from Egypt to Borneo to North American Indians, salt was also thought to cause sexual arousal or to spur reproduction.

It’s trendy now to write history from “below,” exploring the perspectives and experiences of regular people, instead of the leaders and the generals. This book accomplishes a similar feat with that workhorse, salt. Salt doesn’t have the gleam and glamour like the quest for gold and territorial conquest, but without it, how would the world’s civilizations have functioned? Would a different method of animal domestication have been found? And what would food preservation have entailed? Would we wonder how to walk like an Egyptian? Would all roads have led to Rome? Would the sun have risen over a British Empire? You’ll never see our most common seasoning the same way again after reading Mark Kurlansky’s Salt.

Sometimes an ear of corn is just an ear of corn, but occasionally it’s something else altogether. Sigmund Freud and his stogey can relax, I’m talking about Charles C. Mann’s revelations in 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (Vintage, 2012). In this compelling book, Mann uncovers history and reads the metaphorical tea leaves on our dinner plates. 1493 delves into the new biological era, the Homogenocene, that was touched off by European trade and exploration, in which globalization created a world that’s much more uniform and that continues to change societies in ambivalent ways.

Christopher Columbus, Hernán Cortés, John Smith, and others were chasing the dream of an oceanic route to China, but what they accomplished was a world-spanning trade system that disrupted ecologies and societies across Europe, North and South America, Africa, and Asia. Some plants and domesticated animals were knowingly transplanted to the Americas. Others were taken from the Americas around the world. The consequences of relocating all these resources couldn’t be foreseen. Corn (or maize, as Mann names it), a native of the North American continent, is a tasty vegetable, but it is also a symbol of this new ecological, economic, and social world. Food plants such as corn, potatoes, and sweet potatoes from the Americas were the sources of a new food security, which in turn, lay the foundation for population explosions in Europe and China. Corn, potatoes, and sweet potatoes led to the development of modern industrial agriculture, which relies on improved crop yields, high-intensity fertilizers, and factory-made pesticides. These same crops also were followed by new crop diseases and pests, deforestation, erosion, flooding, and associated with these, social destabilization.

Then there were the accidental transplants. Some of these, like honeybees, might be seen as beneficial. Others, like dandelions and earthworms, caused deep alterations in the ecosystems into which they spread. But there can be no doubt that epidemic diseases, and the hosts that carry and spread them (like rats and mosquitoes), devastated the Americas, directly or indirectly killing a vast majority of the indigenous population.

Mann highlights the many changes wrought by the voluntary and forced migrants—human or trade good, mineral or microbe, flora or fauna—as they moved around the globe and the consequences of these movements. The Homogenocene, ongoing now for more than half a millenium, is at best, a cautionary tale. My apple pie, that quintessential American dessert, wouldn’t be possible without apples and honey bees from Europe, sugar from New Guinea (and in more recent history, the forced labor that made sugar an affordable commodity), butter from European cows, or wheat from the Middle East. But when I read about the newest proposal to introduce bacteria to control the odor from bird droppings in San Diego or the newest foodie fashion for quinoa, what I see is the continually spreading ripples of Columbus’s search for China 500 years ago. Not always a cheerful read, to be sure, but I certainly recommend Mann’s 1493 to any Geeky Foodie who likes to toss social and environmental politics, history, and economics with her locally-grown micro-greens.

Do you think a book like 1493, which is not centrally about food and cooking, should be recommended in a foodie blog? What foodie books (geeky or otherwise) are you reading?