The first question on the “Food Disgust Test,” a personality quiz that is currently grossing out Twitter, reads: “It is sickening to eat bread from which mold has been cut away.” To respond, you drag a slider from “Disagree” on the left to “Agree” on the right, according to your feelings on the matter. “This is ten times more fun than the [Myers-Briggs] test,” posted @buttpraxis, linking to the test that’s hosted on the bland-looking website IDRLabs.com. The FDT’s 32 ew-or-eh questions about food-disgust “triggers” are even more fascinating than Ms. Praxis lets on.
I do not eat cucumbers that have ripened so much that they can be bent. (For me? Strongly Disagree.)
I feel disgusted when I chew on irregular bits of animal meat. (Strongly Agree.)
My results, when they arrived, were represented in a circular chart with eight equal pieces, labeled with categories—Insect Contaminants, Animal Flesh, Hygiene, Human Contaminants, Mold, Fruit, Fish, Vegetables—with the degrees of my disgust shown in color. I scored high in the Hygiene, Animal Flesh, and Fish categories, which makes sense for a quasi-vegetarian traumatized by a plunge into forcibly adventurous pescatarianism in the course of a high school study-abroad experience. (Raw, live oysters, at age 16? I did it to be polite. And now look at me.)
A bunch of my Slate colleagues rose to the bait, taking the test and sharing results back and forth. Most of us landed in the “low” to “normal” range. (One colleague got a 19 percent and shared her chart with a self-deprecating: “I’m so gross haha.” Later in the conversation, she revealed that she believes that certain Thanksgiving leftovers “never” go bad, an idea that is … inventive!) We wondered together what was meant in one question asking whether you would accept “food from strangers.” (“I would rather accept food from strangers in a restaurant than from most people I know,” one colleague said.) And we speculated about the difference between mold on cheese (fine if you cut it off) and mold on marmalade (not fine if you scoop it out). We pondered whether we would change our answers if we got really, really hungry.
My mouth waters when I see a whole pig on a skewer. (Strongly Disagree.)
I do not eat potatoes or carrots whose skin has shrunk a bit from aging. (Strongly Disagree.)
The researchers who put the test together, Christina Hartmann and Michael Siegrist, probably didn’t anticipate that IDRLabs.com, a website without an About page that seems to specialize in ingesting, and sometimes developing, personality tests, would make this one go baby-viral on a Tuesday afternoon in 2023. On their Privacy page, IDR describes itself as “some geeks that make tests.” Most recently, it put up a test that lets you know which character you are like in the Netflix hit Ginny & Georgia; a while ago there was a test based on the Jock-Nerd/Prep-Goth alignment meme that got some attention on TikTok. The whole approach is borderline BuzzFeed circa 2012, with a bit more serious psychology behind it.
I would not eat avocado pulp that has turned slightly brown. (Strongly Disagree.)
Seeing a hair in my soup does not really bother me. (Disagree.)
In a 2018 paper explaining their thinking in developing the FDT, Hartmann and Siegrist write that a “disgust reaction” is assumed to “cognitively trigger disease-preventive behavior to avoid health threats.” But, they pointed out, everyone’s disgust reaction is not the same! That matters because, if you’re not disgusted enough in moving about the world, you might eat mold; if you are too disgusted, you might not eat a brown banana, and you’d miss out on nutrition. This human variation is unusually interesting—especially to people on the web—because disgust about certain kinds of food is also part of people’s identities. My kindergartner has just started practicing grossed-out faces that she’s clearly learning from her friends. Disgust is a feeling; disgust can also be a performance. Sometimes the two things overlap.
It is nauseating to have a whole fish, including its head, served to me on my plate. (Strongly Agree. Could not agree more.)
I would not eat part of an apple that had a worm in another part of it. (Strongly Disagree.)
Hartmann and Siegrist created the Food Disgust Scale not only to understand people’s relationship with food but also to “help enhance the understanding of consumer acceptance of new foods and food technologies.” To further that “understanding,” I have only one suggested update to this test: The next edition must include a question about how you feel when you watch the fake blood emerge from the top of an Impossible “beef” patty, while it cooks on the grill. That one’s a real stumper.
