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A worm in a salad bag makes you nauseous? Worse, you will never eat from a dirty plate! These are examples of food disgust measured by a scientific test whose results are buzzing on Twitter. Everyone having fun posting their own score. Internet users see it as the new personality test not to be missed.
Are you repelled by a slightly moldy apple? Are you disgusted at the idea of people touching your food on your plate? You will never taste insects while you salivate for sushi and you love to eat very rare meat? We don’t all have the same level of acceptance when it comes to food. Above all, we are not put off by the same things and our risk-taking threshold is different. This is exactly what the “food disgust testwhich is currently buzzing on Twitter.
A test developed by scientists at the University of Zurich
The matter is very serious and has nothing to do with the questions that women’s magazines regularly ask us. This questionnaire was developed by two scientists from the Technical University of Zurich in Switzerland, Christina Hartmann and Michel Siegrist. Its scientific interest has been the subject of a publication in the journal Science Direct.
It consists of 32 questions to which you simply have to answer whether you agree or disagree. They cover eight aspects of food that can be off-putting: animal flesh, hygiene, human contamination, mould, rotting fruit, fish, rotting vegetables and contaminating insects. At the end, you are told your level of food disgust, through a percentage specifying whether you are average or not.
Studying the origin of food disgust
Beyond the circular and colored graph that tells you what type of food you are more or less repelled by, the researchers mainly shed light on the mechanisms of food disgust. While it may be a primary reaction of self-preservation from disease – the study even speaks of human instinct with regard to the decomposition of fruit or an avoidance measure when a food is nibbled by a worm, the analysis reports that the disgust for unclean vegetables can also come from childhood, “and it is often difficult to change later”.
But there is also a cultural dimension to food disgust, especially when confronted with animal flesh. If a French gourmet salivates for frogs’ legs or snails, a Japanese consumer is not put off by the idea of swallowing shirako, that is to say the seminal liquid of fish, or shiokara, made from the viscera of a fermented seafood product.
NO to diets, YES to WW!
A test that has gone viral
First relayed by a user @buttpraxis on Twitter on April 18, the “food disgust test” quickly went viral. Each applying to answer the many questions and to publish his score. If this analysis has become popular, it is because the initiator of this buzz immediately compared it to a famous personality test, that of Myers Briggs. A tool used by managers, it assesses our ability to evolve among our peers, but also to interact with the environment or our way of apprehending the world. It makes it possible to identify the strong points and the weak points of a personality; that’s why it’s a measure that some bosses like to use… From there to imagining that they prefer to analyze the level of food disgust of a potential candidate in order to identify his personality, we are probably far from it…