Just as we adorn sex with the fancy gold-leaf filigree of love, so we dress the need for sustenance in the finery of cooking and connoisseurship…Yes, men and women eat meals. When it comes to literature about eating, science has been a little hard to hear amid the clamor of cuisine. She was the guest editor of the 2011 Best American Science and Nature Writing, a finalist for the 2014 Royal Society Winton Prize, and a winner of the American Engineering Societies' Engineering Journalism Award, in a category for which, let's be honest, she was the sole entrant.

Her 2009 TED talk made the organization's 2011 Twenty Most-Watched To Date list.

She serves as a member of the Mars Institute's Advisory Board and the Usage Panel of American Heritage Dictionary. Mary has written for National Geographic, Wired, Discover, New Scientist, the Journal of Clinical Anatomy, and Outside, among others. Mary Roach is the author of the New York Times bestsellers STIFF: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers GULP: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal, PACKING FOR MARS: The Curious Science of Life in the Void BONK: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex and GRUNT: The Curious Science of Humans at War. Mary Roach is a science author who specializes in the bizarre and offbeat with a body of work ranging from deep-dives on the history of human cadavers to the science of the human anatomy during warfare. Like all of Roach’s books, Gulp is as much about human beings as it is about human bodies. With Roach at our side, we travel the world, meeting murderers and mad scientists, Eskimos and exorcists (who have occasionally administered holy water rectally), rabbis and terrorists-who, it turns out, for practical reasons do not conceal bombs in their digestive tracts. We go on location to a pet-food taste-test lab, a fecal transplant, and into a live stomach to observe the fate of a meal. Why is crunchy food so appealing? Why is it so hard to find words for flavors and smells? Why doesn’t the stomach digest itself? How much can you eat before your stomach bursts? Can constipation kill you? Did it kill Elvis? In Gulp we meet scientists who tackle the questions no one else thinks of-or has the courage to ask. The alimentary canal is classic Mary Roach terrain: the questions explored in Gulp are as taboo, in their way, as the cadavers in Stiff and every bit as surreal as the universe of zero gravity explored in Packing for Mars. “America’s funniest science writer” (Washington Post) takes us down the hatch on an unforgettable tour.

Gulp by mary roach