Mary Roach: preference

Transcript context

…In your book Gulp, which is about the mechanics of eating, you draw a distinction between stimulated and unstimulated saliva. When you hear that, does it strike you at all as odd? Or it’s like “Oh of course, here’s my unstimulated saliva coming up.” Well right now, yes. I need more unstimulated saliva right now because otherwise you can get those horrible mouth sounds that radio people hate. But that’s the kind of thing I get very excited about, the fact that there are two different kinds. Not only are there two different kinds of saliva, but there’s two different ways of collecting it, so that’s kind of exciting for me — we don’t have to go into that. The fact that there is stimulated saliva, just chewing — it doesn’t matter what you chew. Your mouth is like, “Well whatever it is that you’ve got in there, I’m going to help you get it down.” So if you’re actually chewing on, essentially it’s like a tampon, and you chew on that, and your body, your mouth confusedly generates saliva to help you swallow that tampon — unused. Unused. [laughter] Anyway, I’m not sure exactly what you wanted me to say about stimulated versus unstimulated saliva, but I’m off and running, obviously. Arguably it was Freud’s view that disgust is there to act as a kind of barrier to satisfying unconscious desire. Do you agree?…

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