Eating aeroplanes

 There's a person recorded in the Guinness Book of Records for eating an aeroplane — a Frenchman called Michel Lotito.

He is said to have consumed quite an array of hardware, starting small with hinges, metal chain, bolts and razors, and working up through medium-sized objects like a waterbed, some chandeliers and a coffin (with handles), to arguably more chewy items like shopping trolleys, a computer, a waterbed and a telly. But his pièce de résistance was without doubt the light aircraft he ate, a Cessna 150 which took him a while to consume.

The Guinness Book of Records people awarded him a brass plaque in recognition of his remarkable digestive achievements, and he ate that, too.

But I was thinking about him today because of mushrooms. 

Opinion on eating mushrooms is divided. Apparently, people who inform us about how to survive an apocalypse say there is no point eating mushrooms because you don't get much calorific value from them but they might kill you. They either are or aren't safe, but are never very nutritious. So it is said, and yet some varieties of mushroom (Lions Mane, Turkeytail etc) reputedly have marvellous healing benefits. They are in the fruit and veg section of the supermarket, but they aren't vegetables — they aren't animals either, but they're said to be more like animals than plants.

But why eating aeroplanes reminded me of eating mushrooms is because (are you the same?) when I eat mushrooms they pass through intact. I probably don't chew my food as assiduously as I should.

There's a very interesting man on YouTube called Lee Copus — his channel is called Kent Carnivore. Lee had ulcerative colitis, followed all the medical dietary advice for managing it, and ended up losing his colon altogether. He had been advised to eat lots of fibre and fruit and vegetables, but the anti-nutrients and plant toxins won the day, and Lee had to have a colectomy. As a result he has a bag attached to the stoma created on his abdomen to collect the digestive material that would normally pass on and out through the colon.

This means that Lee has an unusual opportunity to assess the extent to which food is digested and processed in the upper gut.

If he eats any fruit or vegetables, they pass out into the bag exactly as they went into his mouth — a bit chewed up of course, but clearly recognisable. But he found that all animal products he ate (meat, cheese, fish, eggs) never passed through as discrete objects; they were always digested and just came through as chyme. No lumps of meat or flakes of fish or pieces of egg, ever.

This is what put Lee on to first realising that fruit and vegetables were pretty much going through him like Michel Molito's aeroplane parts; he ate them, yes, and they went through him, but they came out as they went in, they were not in any real sense part of his food.

This is how I am with mushrooms. They are one of the things on the short but enjoyable list of food I can eat, so I have re-integrated them into what I have because I like the taste of them and they create variety; but they may well be entirely pointless beyond those motivating factors. Like eating aeroplanes.

Now, Lee believes he would still have his colon if he had latched on to this earlier and taken plants off the menu before he needed surgery. And surely most of us who attempted to eat a bicycle or a television would end up in the emergency room.

So I'm not sure now to what extent it's a spectrum — ranging from people who can only manage animal products, through those who can manage a few fruits and veg but not mushrooms, to those who can even eat the supermarket trolley itself — or if it's more that we should all really only eat animal products (what Dr Ken Berry describes as the proper human diet), just adding in broccoli and shiitake and chandeliers as an idiosyncratic quirk to satisfy a longing for variety.