“Please put your genitals on the table.” Epidemiologist and author Elizabeth Pisani was speaking to a crowd of 60 diners sitting beneath the gilded iron arches of a Victorian sewage pumping station. “No, you cannot trade your genitals with your neighbour – you have to take the genitals you are given.” A few chastised guests eyed their neighbours penises and vaginas with envy. “I have a penis,” announced Pisani, holding up a yellow banana flavoured phallic marshmallow. “Will anyone give me an orifice in which to insert my penis?” “I have a cunt,” a woman shouted, holding up a concentric circled sweet. “I have a bum hole,” another offered. “I’ll see your bum hole and raise you money,” Pisani countered. “Now, the game begins: if somebody at your table wants a pairing with your genitals, see what you will readily accept – a cock with a cunt? – or what you might want to be paid for.” Many pairings were made, including the sale of a bum hole by a New Scientist reporter for two Euros. This very serious scientific experiment precluded the dessert course at “Dirt Banquet,” held in Crossness Pumping Station and hosted by Guerilla Science (of which I’m a member, more on this later) and food artisans Bompas and Parr. Our goal: to challenge our guests to think more critically about what they consider to be dirty, and why, by combining talks by scientists – anthropologist Val Curtis on the evolution of disgust, and Pisani, the author of The Wisdom of Whores, on sex – with a five-course meal of “dirty” food inside the antique sewage facility. We were inspired by a genuine public health concern supported by decades of research: many scientists increasingly believe that allergies, asthma and many other auto-immune disorders and illnesses are at least partly attributable to a lack of dirt in our lives. Known as the “hygiene hypothesis,” this posits that our developing bodies are exposed to unnaturally low levels of bacteria, mould and other infectious agents as we mature, leading to hyper-reactive and maladjusted immune systems. “We are using the ‘hygiene hypothesis’ as a wake-up call for people to welcome dirt back into their lives – and in the case of our banquet, into their stomachs and minds,” explains Guerilla Science director Jen Wong. (The banquet was funded by the British biomedical research charity the Wellcome Trust, which has supported a host of other events and publications this year under the simple banner “Dirt”.) Crossness – the first sewage pumping station in the world, left to disrepair for 50 years – is being restored with Wellcome grants. The Victorian-era hanging fruits, climbing ivy and soaring buttresses glisten red, white and green once more, having emerged from more than a century of grime. For the evening, we were able to turn on one of the four 52-tonne pumps; guests entered the building as the massive wheel slowly spun, filling the giant cathedral-like hall with grumbling shakes and billowing steam. “I’ve waited years to get inside this building,” Bompas said, light mottling the ironwork floor up to the ceiling. Feast of Filth With radioactive cheese serum appetizers, bacterial jellies, blue cheeses, Papua New Guinean mud cakes, charcoal cleansed Thames water, durian chocolates and civet coffee (recovered from the feces of wild cats), the meal was “inspired by the physical, biological, ethical, architectural, social, political and temporal dimensions of dirt,” says Sam Bompas, one of the menu’s creators and a rising star on London’s gastro scene. “We wanted people to engage with the concept of ‘dirt’ on many different levels.” Some of the ingredients, topics and settings were provocative – and intended to be so. “We designed this banquet to visceral and instinctive responses of disgust, whilst inspiring our guests to overcome those responses and in so doing reconsider their relationship to dirt,” says Wong. The most contentious dish: the fermentation platter, featuring netto beans (aptly described as “vomit beans”), served as a garnish to fermented fish with pickled ginger. These, says Bompas, were sourced in the wild west markets of London. “We had to trawl through many Chinese supermarkets to find them,” he says. The sticky tendrils of the hard-won beans, sadly, were “too horrifying for many people.” Before the netto was served, Val Curtis gave her lecture on the evolution of disgust. “I hope you all have strong stomachs,” she said, taking her place above the crowd like a preacher in a pulpit. “But you must do or else you wouldn’t be here.” Disgust is actually “the hygiene instinct,” she says. “It keeps us from eating what might make us sick.” Surveying cards that all the guests had previously filled out, listing three things they find disgusting, she spoke for twenty minutes on maggots, feces, and fetishes, before inviting guests to dine on ingredients resembling some of the offending items. The main course – roast pork with barbeque sauce vegetables – was refreshingly familiar, but came served inside clay pots teeming with earth. Guests were required to dig for their dinner, and the tables (and plates) wound up covered in soil. “No genitals in mouths, please” Laphroaig jelly breasts with gold leaf nipples drizzled in posset of ambergris (a kind of whale expectorant) preceded Pisani’s short talk on sex. These were instantly devoured before she could even take the stage, standing on a balcony next to a towering steam engine. “I can’t believe everyone ate their genitals right away,” she later said. Her opening line was an apt quote from Woody Allen: “Is sex dirty? Only if it’s done right.” Joining her, a sexual expert of considerable knowledge: Catherine Stephens, a sex worker who’s slept with more than 4,000 clients. With the genital pairing game, Pisani and Stephens hoped to illustrate that what people will pay for and why provides insights into what we value – and what we consider dirty. And “dirty”, of course, varies widely. “What constitutes dirty sex is what crosses your personal boundaries as transgressive,” she later said via phone. “For example, anal sex to some is just sex with a different orifice, but to others it’s ‘dirty’ – and therefore, to some, much more fun.” A journalist turned academic, Pisani has spent many years in anthropological surveys of prostitutes, johns, and other individuals whose sexual behaviours are often narrowly understood by traditionally minded public health professionals. She’s perhaps best known for surveys of the attitudes and behaviours of transgendered prostitutes in Indonesia (she speaks Mandarin and Bahasa Indonesia). “I try and ask questions that have potential relevance to people’s actual lives – the challenges, joys and pleasures that people actually experience in real life, rather than the narrow boxes that public health nerds define,” she says. For example, if men complain of disliking condoms widely, simply insisting that they are the best and only means of preventing new STD infections will not help. “If we don’t try and think of the problems that people are working with, we won’t identify solutions.” The genital dessert game was intended to inspire guests to consider the diversity of ways that we can have sex – a topic many find threatening – through the use of a decidedly non-threatening unit of exchange: candy. Her impression? “I was surprised nobody at the table tried to pair a mouth with an anus.” Science by Stealth Guerilla Science did not find itself staging banquets of filth inside sewage pumping stations with professional sex workers overnight – four years of experimentation brought us here. “Science Camp” began in 2007 as a small tent in a field at the Secret Garden Party, one of England’s most riotous music festivals, with eight lectures on topics such as quantum mechanics and the structure of DNA. Several of us joined the following summer, all with a shared philosophy: science belongs at festivals, alongside music, theatre, comedy and other entertainment. Far from boring, science is about discovering how remarkable the universe is – truth genuinely is stranger than fiction. We’ve since grown to six team members – most of whom work full-time jobs at museums in London – and now stage events far more experimental than standalone lectures. Our most recent: a life drawing class inside the iconic Battersea Power Station (perhaps the most famous Art Deco building in the world), with the anatomy of the models painted on their skin. Prior to that, we held workshops inside an abandoned hospital on lobotomy techniques and electroconvulsive treatment as part of the Secret Cinema’s homage to One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. Taking science, and scientists, into ever more unusual settings, our mantra has become “to set science free,” as Wong puts it. The Dirt Banquet, pairing food artisans with scientists, exemplifies our strap-line: “We mix science with art, music and play.” Unconventional cross-disciplinary collaborations between artists, musicians and performers have become our stock-in-trade – such as a game exploring the condition synaesthesia that paired neuroscientists with the professional agency of play Coney, featuring a giant brain covered in flowers and cogs. Such cooperative projects – sculptures incorporating new forms of technology, or genetically modified bacterial paintings – are broadly known in some circles as “sci-art,” and generally aim to break down perceived barriers between the arts and the sciences. “But the whole ‘sci-art’ label isn’t really helpful,” says Wong. “In the past, it’s simply been linked to a lot of funding schemes, and merely placed science alongside art. We’re trying to offer something more rich, actually blending disciplines seamlessly together, to showcase not just science and art but all the things in between.” All photos by Mike Massaro
