Grossopedia: A Startling Collection of Repulsive Trivia You Won’t Want to Know!. Rachel Federman

       Dedication

       For my fifth-grade teacher, Mr. McInerney, who pushed us way beyond our comfort zone in a magical classroom where we were encouraged to experiment, learn from failure, face our fears, and prioritize true growth over outward measures of success—an approach to teaching that was rare then and, thanks to dwindling funds for public education and current testing mandates, is now all but extinct.

      CONTENTS

       Cover

       Title Page

       Dedication

      Introduction

       Bizarre Cuisine

       Outlandish Animal Land

       Wickedly Weird News

       Fetid Festivals

       The Horrors of Modern Science

       To Each His Own (Disgusting Habits)

       Unnatural Wonders

       The Indecent Tourist

       Creepy Crawlies

       Icky History

       Around the (Roach-Infested) House

       Eco-Unfriendly

       Barbaric Bodies

       Farts & Culture

       Gross Rebellion

       Postscript: What is Disgust?

       Selected Bibliography

       Illustration Credits

       Acknowledgments

       About the Author

       About the Illustrator

       Copyright page

       About the Publisher

       INTRODUCTION

       I get really easily grossed out. So easily—and dramatically—in fact, that I used to faint because of it. The first time was when our amazing fifth-grade teacher, Mr. McInerney, mentioned that we’d be dissecting a sheep’s eye. Or maybe he just had a sheep’s eye in a jar of formaldehyde. I only heard the first part of the sentence, but I don’t think I myself ever laid eyes on the eye of the ewe.

      I also lost consciousness briefly when he told us to collect cells to examine under the microscope by running a little wooden stick against the inside of our cheeks. I woke up to the sound of Mr. McInerney’s voice asking, “Are you with us?” I was, but it was touch and go from there—through junior high and most of high school. In chorus, I once fell off the back riser during a holiday show while the rest of the choir finished singing Billy Joel’s “And so It Goes.” I don’t even remember what it was that initially bothered me. My mom heard the thud of my head hitting the stage but didn’t realize I was missing until the end of the song. Another time, I ended up in the nurse’s office after reading a story in English class about a boy who swam underwater so long that his blood vessels burst.

      Some people said what I had was a “real thing,” and that it even had a name: blood-injury phobia (see You Look a Little Pale,). Others just said I had a weak stomach. In biology lab, everyone around me wielded scalpels and seemed remarkably brave, while just I prayed for the bell to ring. I started to realize something funny, which was that hearing disturbing stories bothered me more than actually seeing something gross. It was my imagination, in the end, that really got the best of me.

      After a while, the other kids started to look out for me. They let the teacher know when a news topic of someone finding a severed hand in the woods or Ozzy Osbourne chewing the heads off bats came up that maybe they should change the subject—either that or give me a pass to study hall. They’d tell me not to look at a slide showing a giraffe carcass being torn apart by leopards. Sometimes they caught me in time, and I put my head between my knees before I blacked out. Most of the teachers understood. I learned to get used to spinning rooms. And to sit by the exit signs.

      Family members joked that after all that fainting, I’d grow up to be a surgeon. That didn’t happen. But I did grow up to write a book about blood, guts, gaping wounds, giant cockroaches, earthworm soup, flying mucus, belly lint, and dead bodies piling up on Mount Everest.

       So here’s the million-dollar question: Did I faint during the writing of this book?

      I did not—although that would have made for a good story. But the truth is, I finally outgrew the phobia when I realized that what actually made me faint wasn’t the sense of disgust or horror I felt when picturing the pile of severed limbs at Gettysburg—it was the fear that I would faint.

      Here’s what actually happened: You faint when your brain doesn’t get enough oxygen. For some people, a drop in blood pressure is the body’s natural response to seeing blood or, in my case, hearing about it. Scientists aren’t sure why, though some think that it may have once been adaptive, causing people to faint in battle or during an attack, to be passed over for dead by the enemy. The drop in blood pressure leads to light-headedness and, if it persists, to fainting, where you end up in a horizontal position and blood levels are restored to your brain. So basically, fainting is the body’s way of correcting the oxygen deficit to the brain. When you think of it that way, it’s not as scary as it seems—as long as you don’t bang your head too hard when you land.

      For me, fainting became a bad habit. When I heard about some guy getting a hole in his carotid artery, before I even had time to think about the blood spurting out, I started to panic about fainting. My blood pressure would drop, the room would spin, and away I’d go. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy. To train myself out of that cycle, I had to stop worrying that I would faint. Eventually I did. Now I don’t even have