You know how you can't smell your house? Or, if you can, it's only for that first second you walk through the door, or after you've been away from home for a long time?
Well, for me, at Easter, my parents' house smells like asparagus pee. Because every year, Easter is the first family get together where asparagus is in season, and every year, I eat my body weight in it. And I'm not the only Surgeon who does so. Both my mother and my aunt provided long, green, crunchy-to-mushy stalks of buttery, salty luxury* at family gatherings last weekend.
As far as I'm concerned, the Easter bunny could hide blanched asparagus around the house and I'd be just as excited to find it as I would peanut butter chocolate eggs. (As long as it wasn't covered in cat hair, which, at my parents' house, would be a feat to pull off.) (No offense, Mom.)
But back to the pee.
My sister and I wondered for the longest time if it was just us (meaning just our family) that got asparagus pee. Feared that we were smelly-peed freaks. Then she got married, and found out that her husband got it, too. I asked my friends and dates, and sure enough, they all had it, too. (I found out one boyfriend got it when he peed in the shower -- p.u.!) We began to wonder if asparagus pee was the opposite of that weirdo science experiment in fifth grade, where you either tasted the nasty, bitter, icky, putrid chemical (me) or not (far too many others for me to feel comfortable).
To quell our worried minds, I did a little research, and found this:
"This question has baffled scientists for over half a century. In 1956, British researchers divided the population into two categories: excretors (those whose urine smells after they eat asparagus) and nonexcretors (asparagus eaters who remain odor free). Since there’s no documentation of the asparagus-pee phenomenon before the 1700s, about the time farmers began using sulfur to fertilize soil, this and subsequent studies hypothesized that a particular gene allows people to process a sulfur-containing compound in asparagus (most likely asparagusic acid). The theory was that if you have that gene, your pee won’t stink. However, they were relying on the test subjects’ own reports and weren’t considering the subjects’ ability to smell.
In 1980, Israeli researchers performed a similar experiment but asked the nonexcretors to smell the excretors’ urine. Shockingly, they found that everyone’s urine smells after eating asparagus; it’s just that some people can’t smell it. So they, too, divided the world into two camps: perceivers and nonperceivers." (from http://www.chow.com/stories/10415)
So there you have it, folks. Hap-pee Easter!
*Asparagus is a little too expensive for my regular budget, especially at Steve's C-Town (Town Town).
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3 comments:
Reminds me of that old quote by Proust:
"... the precious essence that I recognized again when, all night long following a dinner at which i had eaten them, they played, in farces as crude and poetic as a fairy play by Shakespeare, at changing my chamber pot into a jar of perfume." (Swann's Way)
-E
I feel utterly illuminated by the investigation you've conducted here. Do you sell T shirts with the Hap-pee Easter logo on them?
I've recently learned my brother-in-law doesn't have asparagus pee. I asked him if he knows what asparagus pee smells like. He says he does. I'm not sure how he found out. I guess if he can smell it in other people's pee, he can tell his doesn't.
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