Comment on Procedural Knowledge Gaps

Tue, 08 Feb 2011 23:11:43 GMT

Define "spitting it up" --if you mean chewing on a piece of raw chicken for 60-120 seconds, and spitting it out if it doesn't taste right, that's just a little odd

That would be spitting out, not up. In any case, what I mean is that I'm eating it for a minute or two before I suddenly have the distinct feeling that something is wrong with what I'm eating, and gently cough it back up.

if you mean swallowing the chicken, then vomiting it back up, that crosses my personal line into "sick from it."

There's a huge difference between vomiting and spitting something up. The latter feels entirely different; for one thing. It feels almost like you never swallowed it at all, it just comes back up like "bzzt... rejected by quality control".

To put it another way, it feels exactly like wanting to spit something out that tastes really bad... except that it just pops back out of your throat instead of merely out of your mouth. There is no unpleasantness to the expulsion; instead it feels like the unpleasantness is contained in the food itself.

I have heard parents use the phrase "spitting up" to describe what happens with babies rejecting a food, and it seems an apt description of the response here.

Believe me, if spitting up was anything like vomiting, it would've put me off of raw foods mighty quickly. The very distinct sensation was actually very convincing that our bodies do indeed have layered defenses against ancestrally relevant forms of food contamination, and specifically that there's a layer of protection that kicks in before hardly any digestion has occurred, but after you've tasted/smelled/swallowed the food.

Believe me, it is a world of difference from cooked-food poisoning, where you're doubled over heaving your intestines out hours after eating. Imagine a linear reduction in discomfort proportional to the time the food spends in your body, with spitting out something nasty at the other end of the spectrum. Spitting up is only slightly more distasteful than spitting something out, and if you have a decent sense of smell, you won't even put it in your mouth to begin with.

Eggs and chicken, however, lose most of their smell when cold (which is why I avoid refrigerating eggs I intend to eat raw). Fish and beef lose less of their odor (and especially, less of their decay odors) when cold, which is probably why people think they're safer to eat raw. (i.e., because when they're not safe, you'll notice this sooner and with less discomfort.)

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