Under the soaring arches of one of Britain’s most remarkable buildings, a gilded iron cathedral of sewage, 60 diners dug into clay pots of earth to get at their main course of roast pork and vegetables. The meal on Saturday had started with bacterial jelly canapes and the earth was followed by prosecco jelly breast desserts.
The UK, once gastronomically uneventful, is today home to some of the worlds’ most extraordinarily experimental culinary experiences, but Guerilla Science is confident that there has never been one quite like the Dirt Banquet, which we hosted with food artisans Bompas & Parr inside the spectacular Crossness Pumping Station. Completed in 1865, this Victorian masterpiece was the ideal venue for a feast of filth, designed “to explore the physical, biological, ethical, architectural, social, political and temporal dimensions of dirt” explains Sam Bompas.
“Dirt is seen in most cultures as something undesirable,” says Jenny Wong, a director of Guerilla Science. “We designed this banquet to provoke visceral reactions of disgust – through the smell of the building, the menu, and the subject matter.
“The context of the banquet – with its majestic architecture, tasty food and engaging speakers – then provoked people’s curiosity to reconsider their relationship to dirt and overcome their disgust responses, so that they could eat and enjoy.”
Funded by the Wellcome Trust, this is one of many events that the biomedical research charity is sponsoring as part of its Dirt Season, a celebration of all things sordid and unhygienic from the history of cholera to sculptures fashioned from faeces (the latter on display in the Welcome Trust’s exhibit hall at its Euston HQ). The aim is to challenge us all to reflect more deeply on just what exactly is “dirt” (once described by anthropologist Mary Douglas as simply “matter out of place”), and its profound implications for human health.
Research suggests that our contemporary obsession with ridding our lives of “dirt” has played a significant role in the rise of allergies and other autoimmune disorders. The “hygiene hypothesis” postulates that many of us become sick because we are, in fact, too clean. Without our daily dose of bacteria, fungal spores and other noxious agents, our immune systems become unbalanced, over-reactive and ill-equipped to cope with ambient levels of “dirt”.
The Wellcome Trust wants you to “welcome dirt back into your lives”. Guerilla Science decided to invite our dinner guests to welcome dirt directly into their bodies. Master chefs Bompas & Parr served an array of delectably filthy food, including mouldy cheeses, bacterial jellies, savoury haggis, Papua New Guinean mud cakes, fermented fish, roast pork (pigs of course being the “dirtiest” of animals), and a dash of posset made with ambergris – whale expectorant once widely used for perfumes and Victorian garnishes.
The mud cakes were “quite tricky” to make, says Bompas. “We had to use mud that was clean – we ended up sterilising the topsoil pellets that went into the geophagy course.”
We fed the minds of our guests as well as their bellies. Anthropologist Val Curtis of the University of London spoke before the second course – fermented fish with pickled vegetables – on her speciality, the evolution of disgust. She encouraged our diners to ponder what they might find revolting, and why.
Before dinner, we had asked our guests to list three things they find disgusting on anonymous slips of paper, which Curtis perused for discussion. The most common offenders were vomit, faeces and maggots – things we all instinctively avoid thanks to evolution.
“Disgust is the voices of our ancestors telling us to stay away from the things that make us sick,” she said. “If we didn’t listen to those voices we wouldn’t be here – if your great-great-great-great grandmother had thought poo was yummy, she would not have survived and you would not be here today.
Also common on the list of disgusting things: bad habits, from picking one’s nose to farting in public. “We are disgusted by bad manners as a kind of moral outrage with people who threaten us with disease,” she explained. “Torture”, “cheating” and “paedophilia” were also listed.
Disgust may be an emotion we wish to avoid experiencing, or even contemplating, but Curtis argued that it’s an important exercise to consider its origins and functions: “I am interested in disgust because it keeps us healthy – it is the hygiene instinct.”
If the first course of conversation was sobering, dessert was anything but: epidemiologist Elizabeth Pisani, author of The Wisdom of Whores, asked our guests to pair their genitals – marshmallow vulvas, rectums and penises – with those of another guest. To make things more interesting, she asked everyone to consider what pairings they might give freely, such as heterosexual sex, and for which pairings they would ask for payment, such as receptive anal sex.
When some diners attempted to swap genitals, she reprimanded them: “Stop that – you get the genitals you are given, you do not get a choice.”
Joining her was Catherine Stephens, a professional sex worker with many years’ experience of clients with unusual tastes. As they played with their genitals, our giggling guests had become like a class of giggling schoolchildren. But as soon as Stephens announced that she had slept with over 4,000 men, the building instantly fell quiet.
“It’s not every day that vomit is spoken about as a prelude to a fermented starter, or that someone announces in all seriousness that they’ve had 4,000 sexual partners over dessert, or that you are asked to ‘put your genitals on the table,'” says Wong.
Though we may blush to discuss anything but “vanilla” heterosexual sex, Pisani argues, the full spectrum of sexual behaviour deserves deeper consideration from an empirical point of view, even if couched in fairly colloquial terms.
“It is considered dirty to have sex with a woman who is menstruating, so many men would prefer to have intercourse with her anus, somehow considered less dirty. You figure that one out,” she said.
Pairing challenging speakers with the most unusual food, in the most sublime setting, Guerilla Science aimed to inspire all our guests to reflect a bit more critically on what they think of as dirty and why. What we may subjectively consider dirty may not actually be so in the harsh light of scientific objectivity.
To that end, Pisani left us with this: “Is sex dirty? We only seem to call it dirty if it’s done right.”