May 11, 2021

"In 2016, during a trip to Zagreb, Croatia, he wandered into the Museum of Broken Relationships."

"As he studied the remnants of strangers’ failed romances—photos of hookup spots; a diet book that a woman received from her fiancé—West came up with an idea for a museum dedicated to failed business products and services. A year later, in Helsingborg, Sweden, he opened the Museum of Failure.... One example on display at the museum was the Newton, a personal digital assistant released by Apple in 1993... also... Bic for Her, a line of pens... DivX, a 2003 trademark for 'self-destructing' DVDs that could be watched for only forty-eight hours.... West realized that if the experience of failure had expedited human innovation, then the experience of disgust was potentially holding us back. Could that aversion be challenged or changed? 'I just wanted to know, Why is it that even talking about eating certain things makes my skin crawl?'... The planning for the [Disgusting Food Museum] began with a more basic question: What counts as food?...Disgust may have originated as a food-rejection system, Paul Rozin, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, told me, 'but it has expanded into a vehicle for perceiving the social and moral world.' Rozin is the pioneer of a subfield called disgust studies. His favorite experiment involves dropping a cockroach into a glass of juice. Most people, of course, refuse to drink the juice, citing the dirtiness of cockroaches. 'What’s amazing is that even if you disinfect the cockroach and convincingly demonstrate that the juice is harmless, people still won’t want to drink it,' Rozin said." 

From "The Gatekeepers Who Get to Decide What Food Is 'Disgusting'/At the Disgusting Food Museum, in Sweden, where visitors are served dishes such as fermented shark and stinky tofu, I felt both like a tourist and like one of the exhibits" by Jiayang Fan (The New Yorker).

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