SOMEONE OUGHT TO BOTTLE THE STUFF
ERIKA SILLETTI STUDIES saliva in a sunny top-floor lab in the Dutch town of Wageningen. A Gaudi poster hangs on one wall, and the windows look recently washed. The day I arrive, she wears a tailored woolen skirt, short but not overly so, black leather boots, and a dove-grey cashmere jumper. If you saw a picture of Silletti in a magazine, you might make yourself feel better by assuming that the creamy skin tone and flawless symmetry of her features had been photoshopped. Only one thing fits my imagined notion of what saliva science looks like: a two-foot-tall, free-standing steel paper-towel holder with the fattest roll of paper towels I’ve ever seen.
I came upon Erika Silletti while roaming the abstracts of a dental conference. She later told me the presentation she gave there was met with blank looks. ‘They think of it as lubricating, and that’s it!’ She went back to her hotel room and called her boyfriend in tears.
It is safe to say that no one in this world understands and appreciates saliva like Erika Silletti.39
HUMANS SECRETE TWO kinds of saliva, stimulated and unstimulated, no more alike than most siblings. The prettier child is stimulated saliva. It comes from the parotid glands, between cheek and ear. When a plate of Erika Silletti’s spaghetti carbonara makes your mouth water, that’s stimulated saliva. It makes up 70 to 90 percent of the two to three pints of saliva each of us generates daily.
We’re going to gather some now. Silletti pulls on a pair of blue latex gloves that so pleasingly complement the grey of her jumper that they look like part of the ensemble. She picks up two stoppered plastic vials. Inside each is a second, smaller vial, which contains a tightly compressed, cylindrical cotton wad. This is the Salivette saliva collection system. Silletti uncaps a Sharpie marker pen and marks an M, for Mary, on one, and an E on the other.
The Salivette instructions are printed in six languages. Erika Silletti, born in Italy, fluent in English, living in the Netherlands, can read three. ‘Kauw dan 1 minuut lichtjes op de wattenrol’. ‘Masticate delicatamente il tampone per un minuto’. ‘Gently chew the tampon for one minute’. This is the simplest way to collect stimulated saliva without also collecting the food that stimulated it: you chew the collection device. This is ‘mechanical stimulation’ (as opposed to gustatory or olfactory stimulation, which we’ll come to). Il tampone will wick our flow, and then Silletti will place each back in its vial and put them in a centrifuge. The liquid will be spun from the cotton and flow down through an opening at the bottom of the inner vial, ending up in the outer vial.
The Salivette makes an unmistakable point: your parotid glands don’t care what you chew. There is nothing remotely foodlike about superabsorbent cotton, yet the parotids gamely set to work. They are your faithful servants. Whatever you decide to eat, boss, I will help you get it down.
Allowing you to eat is the most obvious but far from the only favour granted by saliva. Silletti removes a bottle of wine vinegar from a tote bag. With a dropper, she squirts some on my tongue. ‘Do you feel it? Saliva is coming in the mouth to dilute the acid.’ It’s as though I’d taken a sip of tepid water. ‘The communication between the brain and mouth’, says Silletti with infectious wonder. ‘It’s so fast!’
Vinegar, cola, citrus juice, wine, all are in the acid range of the pH scale: from around pH 2 to 3. Anything under pH 4 will dissolve calcium phosphate, a key component of tooth enamel. The process is called demineralisation. Take a drink of anything acid, and if you are paying attention, you will notice a sudden warm slosh: parotid saliva arriving like the cavalry to bring the pH back up to the safe zone. Earlier, Silletti paged through a Dutch-language textbook on saliva (speeksel) to show me close-up photographs of teeth belonging to dry-mouthed people – those with Sjögren’s syndrome or whose salivary glands have been damaged by radiation treatments. ‘It’s really shocking’, she said, and it was: gaping brown lesions all along the gum line. ‘Their teeth are so soft that they cannot even eat properly.’
Sugar contributes to tooth decay only indirectly. Like humans, bacteria are fond of it. ‘Bacteria get all crazy – party, party – they metabolise the sugar, break it down, and they release their metabolites, and these are acid’ (though not as acid as cola or wine). In other words, sugar itself doesn’t cause cavities; it’s the acidic metabolites of the bacteria that feed on the sugar. As with acidic foods, saliva dilutes the acid and brings the mouth back to a neutral pH.
You may be wondering, though probably not, why newborns – who have no teeth to protect – produce excessive volumes of drool. Silletti has answers. One is simple mechanics. ‘They lack teeth to physically keep it in there.’ Your lower incisors are a seawall holding back the salivary tide. The other reason is the newborn’s high-fat, 100 percent whole-milk diet. Baby saliva – so cute! – contains extra lipase, an enzyme that breaks down fats. (Adults have lipase mainly in their intestines.) More saliva means more lipase. As babies move on to a more varied diet, the salivary lipase tapers off.
The main digestive enzyme in stimulated saliva – everyone’s, regardless of age – is amylase. In Silletti’s dancing Italian accent it sounds like a liqueur or a film ingénue. Amylase breaks starches down into simple sugars that the body can use. You can taste this happening when you chew bread. A sweet taste materialises as your saliva mixes with the starch. Add a drop of saliva to a spoonful of custard, and within seconds it pours like water.
This suggests that saliva – or better yet, infant drool – could be used to pretreat food stains. Laundry detergents boast about the enzymes they contain. Are these literally digestive enzymes? I sent an email to the American Cleaning Institute, which sounds like a cutting-edge research facility but is really just a trade group formerly and less spiffily known as the Soap and Detergent Association.
With no detectable appreciation for the irony of what he had written, press person Brian Sansoni referred me to a chemist named Luis Spitz. And when Dr Spitz replied, ‘Sorry, I only know soap-related subjects’, Sansoni – still without a trace of glee – gave me the phone number of a detergent industry consultant named Keith Grime.
When I’d composed myself sufficiently, I put in a call to Grime. The answer is yes. Higher-end detergents contain at least three digestive enzymes: amylase to break down starchy stains, protease for proteins, and lipase for greasy stains (not just edible fats but body oils like sebum). Laundry detergent is essentially a digestive tract in a box. Ditto dishwashing detergent: protease and lipase eat the food your dinner guests didn’t.
Credit for the idea of using digestive enzymes for cleaning goes to chemist and Plexiglas inventor Otto Röhm. In 1913, Röhm extracted enzymes from livestock pancreases and used them to presoak dirty fabric, perhaps the clothes of the slaughterhouse staff in exchange for the pancreases; history has forgotten the details. Extracting enzymes from animal digestive tracts is costly and labour-intensive. For the first commercially produced laundry enzyme, scientists turned to a protease created by bacteria. Commercial lipase followed soon after. Here the gene was transferred to a fungus. Fungi are bigger and thus easier to deal with. You don’t need a microscope to see your herd, or crop, or whatever collective noun applies to fungi.
Grime told me about an enzyme found on the forest floor that breaks down the cellulose in dead, fallen trees. When he worked at Procter & Gamble, he tried it out as a fabric softener. (That’s how softeners work. They ever so mildly digest the fibres.) That didn’t work out, but the enzyme did something even better. It digested the cotton fibrils that tangle up and form pills on your jumpers. (Crushingly, the anti-pilling enzyme doesn’t work on wool.)
We had travelled a long distance from saliva, and I had not asked the question I’d called to ask. It was time to come in from the forest.
‘If you dribble something on your shirt while you’re eating’, I asked Grime, ‘does it make sense to dab it with saliva? As a kind of natural laundry presoak?’
‘That’s an interesting thought.’
Dr Grime carries a stain pen. He does not use his own spit.
Art conservators do. ‘We make cotton swabs on bamboo sticks and moisten the swab in our mouths’, says Andrea Chevalier, senior paintings conservator with the Intermuseum Conservation Association. Saliva is especially helpful for fragile surfaces that solvents or water would dissolve. In 1990, a team of Portuguese conservators pitted saliva against four commonly used nonanatomical cleaning solutions. Based on its ability to clean but not damage water-gilded gold leaf and low-fired painted clay surfaces, saliva ‘was judged the “best” cleaner’. Denatured saliva, stripped of its enzymatic powers, was also tested and proved inferior to straight spit.
For more typical cleaning jobs, painting conservators, like laundry formulators, turn to commercially produced digestive enzymes. Protease, the protein digester, is used to dissolve washes made from egg white or hide glues. (Less enlightened conservators of yore used to spread glue made from rabbit hides onto canvases to consolidate flaking paint.) Lipase, the fat digester, is used to eat through the layers of linseed oil that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century painters applied to improve light refraction and ‘feed the surface’ of their artworks.
Chevalier volunteered that some conservators’ saliva cleans noticeably better than others’, and that this occasionally prompted speculation about how many martinis these individuals were having at lunch. In reality, there are naturally large individual differences in the chemical make-up of people’s saliva.
And in people’s flow rates. Silletti and I, for instance, chewed our cotton wads for the same amount of time. I produced .78 millilitres of stimulated saliva; she produced 1.4. She tried to reassure me. ‘It doesn’t say anything about how good you are or how good I am with saliva.’
‘Erika, I’m a dried-up husk.’
‘Don’t say that, Mary.’
Silletti excuses herself. ‘I want to go get some ice. The reason is that even after one minute, this will start to smell very bad.’40
While she is out, I will take this opportunity to share with you the extremely surprising findings on the topic of olfactory stimulation of saliva. The notion that food smells make your mouth water is, science says, erroneous. Science has said this over and over, most recently in 1991, at King’s College London. Ten subjects donned plastic odour-delivering face masks and 20p-sized Lashley cups. (The Lashley cup, a sort of glandular beret, fits on top of the parotid and collects its secretions.) Food odours wafted into the volunteers’ noses: vanilla, chocolate, peppermint, tomato, and beef. Only one smell, and in only one subject, caused a significant increase in salivation. Oddly, this subject was a vegetarian, and she was smelling beef. Upon questioning, the woman revealed that the smell had nauseated her. The salivation was the kind that precedes throwing up.
It is easy to criticise that study. Sitting in a lab with a plastic mask on your face and sniffing chemically synthesised odorants does not approximate the typical mealtime mouth-watering scenario. This does, though. In 1960, a bright-eyed, full-lipped young physiologist named Alexander Kerr fried up bacon and eggs in his lab at Harvard. He did so in front of three hungry volunteers, whose parotid flow was measured via a type II outflow recorder41 – the Lashley cup having not yet been invented. Even here, no one salivated any more than he had before the cooking began. The subject identified as A.G. didn’t buy it. A.G. was positive he could feel his mouth ‘watering profusely’ in the moments before he began eating. Kerr insisted that wasn’t so. He told A.G. that the feeling was an artefact caused by shifting his attention to the inside of his mouth and suddenly becoming ‘conscious that his mouth contains saliva’. I have seen the data, but I too find it hard to believe Dr Kerr.
IT’S BEEN SNOWING all morning. Wet clumps of flakes flock the trunks and branches of the trees outside the lab. Silletti joins me at the window. She holds the small glass beakers that contain our fresh-from-the-centrifuge stimulated samples.
‘It’s beautiful’, I am saying. Silletti agrees, but I notice she isn’t looking out the window. Is it possible she thinks I am referring to the contents of the beakers? I’d say that, yes, it is possible. You’ve never seen such clear, clean-looking spit. Stimulated saliva looks, tastes, and flows like water – it is, in fact, 99 percent water. Water with some proteins and minerals. Like water from different springs, each person’s saliva contains minerals in unique proportions. (People whose saliva naturally contains a lot of salt are slightly oblivious to it in their food.)
‘So somebody’, I observe, ‘could do a taste test with various salivas.’
‘If somebody would like to do that, yes.’
Somebody – really everybody – wouldn’t. I point to the beaker labelled E. ‘What about just your own? Would you ever – ’
‘No, I wouldn’t. Even me. Although actually, you are drinking it all the time.’
‘Right, so – ’
‘No.’
An intriguing double standard applies to your own saliva. As long as it stays in your mouth, it’s benign, welcomed even, no more offensive than the water it tastes like. Outside your mouth, it’s almost as vile and contemptible as a stranger’s. As part of a study, our friend from the University of Pennsylvania psychology department, Paul Rozin, asked subjects to imagine a bowl of their favourite soup and to rate their liking of it. He then asked them to rate that same bowl of soup after they’d imagined spitting into it. Forty-nine out of fifty subjects lowered their rating. Among certain castes in India, writes Edward Harper in ‘Ritual Pollution as an Integrator of Caste and Religion’, spitting on someone puts even the spitter ‘in a state of severe impurity’, because it is assumed that some of his saliva has ‘rebounded onto him’.
The saliva taboo can make life burdensome for researchers. Silletti’s colleague René de Wijk did a study years ago that looked at how the salivary breakdown of starch mobilises fats and enhances flavour. (Fat is the main carrier of flavour.) To do this study, he needed his subjects to rate the taste of custard samples with and without a drop of their saliva added. You can’t just have them spit in it, he explained, because then they won’t go near it. He had to collect samples of their saliva without telling them why, and then add it behind their backs, like a spiteful waiter.
The same double standard applies to all ‘body products’, as Rozin calls them, managing to make snot and saliva sound like spa purchases. We are large, mobile vessels of the very substances we find most repulsive. Provided they stay within the boundaries of the self, we feel no disgust. They’re part of the whole, the thing we cherish most.
Paul Rozin has given a lot of thought to what he calls the psychological microanatomy of the mouth: Where, precisely, is the boundary between self and nonself? If you stick your tongue out of your mouth while eating and then withdraw it, does the ensalivated food now disgust you? It does not. The border of the self extends the distance of the tongue’s reach. The lips too are considered an extension of the mouth’s interior, and thus are part of the self. Though culture shifts the boundaries. Among religious Brahmin Indians, writes Edward Harper, even the saliva on one’s own lips is considered ‘extremely defiling’,42 to the extent that if one ‘inadvertently touches his fingers to his lips, he should bathe or at the least change his clothes’.
The boundaries of the self are routinely extended to include the bodily substances of those we love. I’m going to let Rozin say this: ‘Saliva and vaginal secretions or semen can achieve positive value among lovers, and some parents do not find their young children’s body products disgusting’.
I recall being told, in primary school, that Eskimos kiss by rubbing noses. Is this an example of a culture reluctant to accept the saliva of a loved one? Gabriel Nirlungayuk, my go-to man for all things Eskimo/Inuit, confirmed that the kunik, or nose rub, has been and remains the traditional alternative to the kiss. ‘Even to this day, now that my children are adults, I kunik them when I have been away for a long time.’ But never girlfriends. By the time Nirlungayuk was a teenager, kissing ‘whiteman’s way’ had caught on. Nobody seemed to have a problem with extending those boundaries. If anything, the Inuit are leaders in the field. ‘Sometimes when my ingutaq – granddaughter – is full of snot, my wife or myself will wipe it clean with our mouths and then spit it out. But we would never consider this with other kids.’
A similar psychology applies to breast milk. It’s considered natural for a child to consume a mother’s milk, or even for a lover to do so, but not a stranger. (Hence the 2011 hullaballoo over the London restaurateur who invited diners to try ice cream made from women’s breast milk.) So reliable is breast-milk consumption as a delimiter of intimate family that Islam recognises a category called ‘breast milk son’, which confers an exemption to the rules on segregation of the sexes. A man can be alone with a woman if she’s immediate family or if she breast-fed him as a child.43 (Sisters sometimes breast-feed each other’s infants, thereby creating breast-milk relatives.) Milk is thicker than blood, or about the same consistency.
SILLETTI HANDS ME a plastic cup and sets a timer. We are moving on to unstimulated saliva. This is background saliva, the kind that’s always flowing, though much more slowly. A minute passes. We turn away from each other and quietly spit in our cups.
‘Look at the difference, compared to stimulated.’ Silletti tilts her cup. ‘You can’t pour it easily. It’s so viscous. Look!’ She dips the end of a glass pipette into her sample and pulls it away. Filament is a nice word, Silletti’s word, for the mucoid strand that trails behind.
Relatively little is known about unstimulated saliva. Partly, Silletti says, because no one wants to work with it.
‘Because it’s so gross?’
‘Because it’s harder to collect. And you can’t filtrate it. It clogs the filter, like hair in the drain. And you cannot be precise, because it’s so slimy.’
‘Right, it’s gross.’
Silletti tucks a strand of her glossy black hair behind her ear. ‘It’s difficult to work with.’
Unstimulated saliva’s trademark ropiness is due to mucins, long chains of amino acids repeating to form vast webs. Mucins are responsible for saliva’s least endearing traits – its viscosity, elasticity, stickiness.44 They are also responsible for some of its more heroic attributes. Unstimulated saliva forms a protective film that clings to the surfaces of the teeth. Proteins in this film bind to calcium and phosphate and serve to remineralise the enamel. Webs of mucins trap bacteria, which are then swallowed and destroyed by stomach acids. This is good, because there are a lot of bacteria in your mouth. Every time you eat something, every time you stick your finger in your mouth, you’re delivering more.
Picture one of those little silver45 balls that cake decorators use. Strip away the metallic coating and soften the texture. You are now picturing the amassed bacteria in one millilitre of unstimulated saliva. Silletti put our samples in the centrifuge and spun cellular from noncellular. Some of what we are looking at is shed mouth cells, but most is bacteria – about a hundred million of them. More than forty species.
Yet never in my life has a cut or sore in my bacteria-crazy mouth become infected. As much as saliva is a bacterial cesspool, it is also an antimicrobial miracle – the former necessitating the latter. As a germ killer, saliva puts mouthwash to shame.46 Saliva has anti-clumping properties, which discourage bacteria from forming colonies on the teeth and gums. There are salivary proteins that retain their antimicrobial abilities even when they themselves are broken down. ‘And they may be even more effective than the whole protein of origin’, Silletti is saying. ‘It’s incredible!’
Saliva’s antimicrobial talents explain some of the folk medicine remedies that have been making the rounds since the 1600s. One 1763 treatise advocates applying ‘the fasting saliva of a man or woman turn’d of seventy or eighty years of age’ to syphilitic chancres of the glans penis. As with the ancient Chinese Materia Medica prescription of saliva ‘applied below arms to counteract fetid perspiration’, one imagines – hopes – that an applicator other than the tongue was employed.
‘It is a known observation among the vulgar that the saliva is efficacious in cleansing foul wounds, and cicatrising recent ones, thus dogs by licking their wounds... have them heal in a very short time’, wrote the eighteenth-century physician Herman Boerhaave. He was correct. Wounds that would take several weeks to heal on one’s skin disappear in a week inside the mouth. In a 2008 rodent study, animals that licked their wounds healed faster than those that could not (because their salivary glands had been disconnected – a wound, alas, that even saliva cannot heal).
More than just disinfecting is going on. Rodent saliva contains nerve growth factor and skin growth factor. Human saliva contains histatins, which speed wound closure independent of their antibacterial action. Dutch researchers watched it happen in the lab. They cultured skin cells, scratched them with a tiny sterile tip, soaked them in the saliva of six different people, and clocked how quickly the wounds healed, as compared to controls. Other components of saliva render viruses – including HIV, the virus that causes AIDS – noninfective in most cases. (Colds and flus aren’t spread by drinking from a sick person’s glass. They’re spread by touching it. One person’s finger leaves virus particles on the glass; the next person’s picks them up and transfers them to the respiratory tract via an eye-rub or nose-pick.)47
The average person, of course, is oblivious to all this. With no more formal criteria than the number of Hollywood monsters featuring copious, pendant drool, you can make the case that saliva remains universally upsetting. And thus maligned, even in the medical community. There has long been an assumption among A&E personnel that human bites are especially likely to become infected and lead to sepsis – a potentially lethal systemic infection. ‘Even the simplest of wounds require copious irrigation and wound toilet’, warn the authors of ‘Managing Human Bites’ in the Journal of Emergencies, Trauma, and Shock.
Not so fast, says rival American Journal of Emergency Medicine. The article title says it all: ‘Low Risk of Infection in Selected Human Bites Treated without Antibiotics’. Only one out of the sixty-two human-bit patients who were not given antibiotics developed an infection. However, the authors excluded high-risk bites, including ‘fight bites’ on the hands. Here it is the aggressor who gets the ‘bite’ – when he splits open his knuckle on another man’s teeth. Fight bites48 tend to get infected, but it is the fault of the knuckle as much as the saliva. Relatively little blood flow reaches the tendons and sheaths of the finger joints, so the immune system has fewer resources with which to fight back. (Ear cartilage is similarly underserved by the vascular system, so if you plan on picking a fight with Mike Tyson, do practise good wound toilet.)
Even the ‘deathly drool’ of the Komodo dragon, the world’s largest lizard, has likely been overstated. Theory holds that Komodo dragon saliva contains lethal doses of infectious bacteria, enabling the reptiles to take on prey far larger than themselves – wild boar, deer, newspaper editors. (San Francisco Chronicle’s Phil Bronstein spent several days on an antibiotic drip after a Komodo dragon attacked his foot during a behind-the-scenes visit at the Los Angeles Zoo in 2001 with his then wife, Sharon Stone.) Rather than having to tackle and kill their prey on the spot, the theory goes, the reptiles need only deliver a single bite and then wait around for the animal to die of sepsis. The scenario has not been documented in the wild, however. A team of researchers from the University of Texas at Arlington attempted a laboratory simulation, using mice as mock prey and, as predator, injections of bacteria from wild Komodo dragon saliva. The scientists found a high death rate among mice injected with a particular bacteria, Pasteurella multocida. However, Australian researchers point out that P. multocida is common in weakened or stressed mammals. They speculate that the dragons may have picked it up from their prey, rather than the other way round. Current thinking postulates a ‘sophisticated combined-arsenal killing apparatus’, featuring venom and anticoagulative agents that lead to shock. The latter would explain ‘the unusual quietness... of prey items’. Prey item Phil Bronstein was unusually not quiet.49 ‘I was pretty pissed.’
Though bacteria and general ropy grossness are probably to blame for saliva’s nasty reputation, it may in part be lingering fall-out from the writings of Hippocrates and Galen, Western medicine’s most influential early (as in, triple-digit AD and BC) thinkers. Both believed sweat and saliva to be the body’s way of flushing away disease-causing impurities. Before scientists realised syphilis and malaria were caused by micro-organisms, the diseases were treated by putting patients in ‘salivating rooms’. It was the same medically quaint principle that persists today in the form of taking a steam or a sauna to ‘sweat out toxins’. Only back then, the steam included vaporised mercury50 to coax more saliva from the patient. No one realised that excessive salivation is a symptom of acute mercury poisoning. The salivating room was a standard feature of hospitals in the 1700s. (As was, charmingly, the ‘apartment for lunatics’.) Patients were left inside until they’d generated six pints of saliva – about three times the amount most people produce in a day.
Not all cultures denigrate saliva. In ancient Taoist medical teachings, stimulated saliva – ‘the jade juice’ – was said to nourish the qi, which boosts the immune defences and, wrote one seventh-century Taoist, ‘puts a man beyond the reach of calamities’. Given this tradition of qi-nourishing saliva retention, why do I so often see old Chinese men spitting? Silletti points out that it’s not saliva being expectorated. It’s phlegm from the lungs or sinuses. They spit it out, she added, because they don’t care to use handkerchiefs or tissues. They think it’s disgusting that we collect the material in our hands.
For saliva-positive attitudes, there is no place like Greece. ‘Greeks spit on pretty much anything they want to protect from the evil eye or bless for good luck’, says Evi Numen. Numen is the exhibitions manager at the Mütter Museum,51 a collection of medical curiosities amassed by Thomas Mütter and housed today at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. Though her job qualifies her to comment on most things bodily and disgusting, her salivary expertise derives from her upbringing. Numen is of Greek extraction. Greeks spit on babies. They spit on brides. They spit on themselves. Though no actual gob is launched. ‘Most people’, explains Numen, ‘say “ftou ftou ftou” instead of actually spitting’.
The Greeks got it from the Roman Catholics, whose priests used to baptise with spittle. The priests got it from the Gospel of Mark – the bit where Jesus heals the blind by mixing dirt with his saliva and rubbing the mud on a man’s eyelids. ‘It’s an interesting passage’, former Catholic priest Tom Rastrelli told me, ‘because the writers of the gospels of Luke and Matthew, who used Mark as their source, redacted a line’. Mark had included a bit about a blind man opening his eyes and seeing what looked like trees walking around. In other words, the treatment was minimally effective. The miracle of Jesus bestowing rudimentary vision to the blind doesn’t have the same ring to it, so the line was cut.
THE DUTCH, BY tradition, are a dairy-farming people. Adults drink milk with dinner. A town will have a shop devoted entirely to cheese. The national dish of the Netherlands, sighs Silletti, is vla: custard. I have been staying in the home of food scientist René de Wijk, the world’s foremost expert on the science of semisolids such as vla. Upon hearing this, Silletti immediately, as though it were a matter of medical urgency, invited me over for home-cooked Italian food.
Silletti is lactose-intolerant and, as concerns Dutch cuisine, just generally intolerant. ‘Everything is based on milk’, she says, arranging sundried tomatoes for a plate of antipasti.
Silletti’s home is a twenty-minute drive from Germany, where the supermarkets sell a decent range of Italian products. She regularly travels across the border to stock up. I don’t blame her. The supermarket near de Wijk’s house sells things like gorte pap – buttermilk barley porridge – and Smeer’m, a kind of spreadable cheese vileness. I’d go home with a cucumber and some peanuts because I wanted something real, something with crunch, something that didn’t sound like a gynaecology exam. There was an entire aisle devoted to vla.
‘The Dutch and their vla...’ Silletti speaks it like a curse word. ‘For me it’s not food. You don’t need teeth or saliva!’
Oddly, the cluster of Wageningen-area universities and research facilities known as ‘Food Valley’ is the home of the foremost expert on the physics of crunchy food, as well as a man who knows more about chewing than anyone else in the world. I am meeting them both tomorrow, at the Restaurant of the Future. This is a cafeteria at Wageningen University where hidden cameras allow researchers to gauge how, say, lighting affects purchasing behaviour, or whether people are more likely to buy bread if you let them slice it themselves. Silletti says she won’t eat there.
‘Because of the cameras?’
‘Because of the food.’