It started with The Twits. My mum must have thought Roald Dahl's classic was the ideal birthday present for her giggling, bookworm eight-year-old son. And it was, right until the scene when Mrs Twit mixes worms into spaghetti and serves it to her husband.
It haunted me for years, especially at mealtimes. I would ungratefully push my bowl of spaghetti back across the table to my mum. "I just can't get those worms out of my mind," I would shrug. A squeamish reader was born.
Literature is rich with stomach-churning dining moments, just waiting to lodge themselves in the memory and ruin the appetite. One of the worst is the "Traditional Sunday Breakfast" chapter in Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting, when Davie manages to send his vomit, wee and poo flying all over a family and their food. Good one that: it didn't just put me off a specific food type, but an entire meal. On a similarly lavatorial note, I could have coped without the character in Gabriel García Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera who so delights in the smell of asparagus and other foods in his urine. Admittedly, though, his description of a cup of tea as tasting of "boiled window" was marvellous.
But it's not all bad – icky scenes can help your bank balance. A predilection for lobster was, fiscally speaking, not a sensible thing for an author and freelance journalist like me to develop. So I am grateful to Chuck Palahniuk for the scene in Survivor where the narrator only realises after eating most of a lobster that its heart is still beating …
The acme of disgusting dining comes in Martin Amis's The Rachel Papers. No, it's not the scene where the narrator, Charles Highway, spits a huge greenie into a bowl of soup that is about to be served to a customer in a restaurant. For a start, no one actually winds up eating it: the chef who had egged him on to do it is so horrified by the volume and density of what the wheezy Highway coughs up that he refuses to serve it. Besides, that scene has at least some comedy value, and I never much cared for soup anyway, particularly after reading Henry Miller's Tropic Of Cancer, where the soup and butter are stored in a toilet.
No, the worst moment in literature for anyone who wants to keep a healthy appetite comes earlier in the book. It's a scene in a west London cafe where Highway watches an old woman cough a giant "caterpillar of glinting phlegm" over her own face, mop it up with some bread and eat it. Oh my. The worst of it is that she's completely gratuitous. She comes and goes from the narrative in the space of a paragraph. Would leaving her out have ruined the story? No, but putting her in has ruined plenty of sandwiches, and I still can't watch people dip pitta bread in hummus without her memory flooding back.
Maybe I'm missing a trick – a compendium of these passages could be the ultimate diet book: "Read this and lose a stone in two weeks!" Let's do it. Any suggestions?
