Hi, my name is Molly Young. I'm a book critic for The New York Times and a contributing

writer to the magazine. About six months ago, I was reading a book by a German scholar named

Vindfried Menninghaus and the book was called Disgust. I was midway through a section titled

Torture Truth and Disemboweled Pigs when my husband happened to glance over and Tee

quite reasonably asked, why are you reading that? And I was like, because disgust is universally

interesting, everybody's interested in this emotion. And he said, I'm not interested.

I, on the other hand, became obsessed with the topic of disgust. And the name that kept

coming up over and over and everything I read was Paul Rosen. Rosen's research was really

the foundation of what would become the explosive area of disgust in academia. So disgust is

defined as an emotional response. It's marked by certain facial movements and it's often

accompanied by nausea or queesiness and a desire to put distance between yourself and the

thing that is disgusting. With Rosen, his initial theory was that disgust was a food-oriented

emotion and that every expression of it tied back in some way to the omnivores dilemma.

That is to say, coming upon a piece of food and wondering whether or not it was too

spoiled to eat. In that instance, disgust is the emotion that keeps you alive. But far

beyond food, Rosen found that this emotion can encompass a whole range of phenomena. We

can get disgusted by stepping in dog poop on the street, looking at hair in the bath

of drain or learning about how a presidential candidate once ate airport salad with

a hair comb as you might remember Senator Amy Klobuchar once famously did. They're

very different things, but your response might be similar. So Rosen's further papers

were an attempt to theorize why that might be. All of us have some kind of baseline level

of disgust sensitivity. I have a low sensitivity and one thing I like to do is read the FDA's

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