This book is an exploration of human digestion. Few of us realize what strange wet miracles of science operate inside us after every meal. In her trademark style, the author investigates the beginning, and end, of our food, addressing such questions as: why crunchy food is so appealing, why it is hard to find words for flavors and smells, why the stomach doesn't digest itself, how much we can eat before our stomachs burst, and whether constipation killed Elvis. Here we meet scientists who tackle the questions no one else thinks of, or has the courage to ask. 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.

Nose job: tasting has little to do with taste -- I'll have the putrescine: your pet is not like you -- Liver and opinions: why we eat what we eat and despise the rest -- The longest meal: can thorough chewing lower the national debt? -- Hard to stomach: the acid relationship of William Beaumont and Alexis St. Martin -- Spit gets a polish: someone ought to bottle the stuff -- A bolus of cherries: life at the oral processing lab -- Big gulp: how to survive being swallowed alive -- Dinner's revenge: can the eaten eat back? -- Stuffed: the science of eating yourself to death -- Up theirs: the alimentary canal as criminal accomplice -- Inflammable you: fun with hydrogen and methane -- Dead man's bloat: and other diverting tales from the history of flatulence research -- Smelling a rat: does noxious flatus do more than clear a room? -- Eating backward: is the digestive tract a two-way street? -- I'm all stopped up: Elvis Presley's megacolon, and other ruminations on death by constipation -- The ick factor: we can cure you, but there's just one thing.