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By Susan McCarthy

April 28, 1999 | As I lay on the bathroom floor, wracked with nausea, I knew exactly where to point the finger of blame, as soon as I was strong enough to point. If I was ever strong enough. If I lived.

I would point at the dinner my mother had served, an Italian dish. Manicotti. She had talked it up: hyped the difficulty of procuring the pasta; likened it to lasagna; boasted of its authenticity; and I had eaten. In fact -- horrible to recall my gullibility! -- I had praised it. We all did. My then-stepbrother engulfed platesful with cries of appreciation and galloped upstairs to top off his meal with a candy bar. Little did we suspect that we were about to become victims of sauce béarnaise syndrome.

As the night went on I began to feel sick and sicker, and finally crept to the bathroom to vomit. There was no question of leaving the bathroom, since it was clear that I would need to keep on vomiting, probably until death.

So I was thinking bad thoughts about manicotti (such an ugly word) when my stepbrother came stumbling in, also sick. After he had unburdened himself somewhat and slumped on the tiles next to me, I offered my sympathy to a fellow manicotti victim.

Incredibly, he defended the stuff. My stepbrother, a person perhaps overly concerned (i.e., more concerned than I) with cleanliness and freshness, declared that the candy bar he had eaten must have sat on the shelf too long and become toxic. He dismissed my arguments that candy bars do not do this, and that I had not had a candy bar, yet I also was sick. I reasoned that we had both eaten manicotti, and we were both dying. Therefore the manicotti had poisoned us. It now seemed clear that manicotti was distilled evil. My stepbrother groaned and disagreed. The manicotti was good, innocent: The candy was foul.

Time passed. We miraculously recovered. It turned out that even those who hadn't had manicotti got sick. It was a stomach flu. But my stepbrother was revolted by that brand of candy bar and, to this day, I loathe manicotti and become agitated if I think too hard about those bulging tubes of pasta, oozing ricotta, stained with tomato sauce, crusted with Parmesan ...

This hatred was caused by something called learned taste aversion, or, more snappily, sauce béarnaise syndrome, a phenomenon that was dismissed as impossible when it was first scientifically described in the 1960s.

Psychologist John Garcia, studying radiation sickness in rats, noticed that rats that got sick began rejecting their perfectly good rat chow. Even when they got better, they disliked it. In a series of experiments, Garcia discovered that even if their sickness isn't caused by the food but by radiation or an injection, and even if they ate the food many hours before they got sick, rats come to hate the food they eat before getting sick.

The dislike was specific to food. Getting sick to their stomachs didn't make the rats dislike their food dish, or a burst of lights and noise -- or the researcher. It was always the food or water they became averse to.

Rats can't actually vomit, being physiologically unable to talk to Ralph on the big white phone. But, as one researcher puts it, "They look like they feel sick. I'm certainly convinced that they feel crummy when we give them drugs that make other animals nauseated."

When Garcia reported his findings, another psychologist, Martin Seligman, was struck by how closely the rats' experiences matched an experience he'd had the month before, when he went out to eat, had steak with sauce béarnaise and then got violently ill.

Even though he learned the next day that "stomach flu was sweeping the department," Seligman writes, he now found sauce béarnaise loathsome. "[J]ust thinking about it set my teeth on edge." It was another ten years before he could eat the stuff again. Seligman, who has an ear for the memorable, coined the name "sauce béarnaise syndrome." It's well known to ship stewards, who learn that seasick passengers often blame the buffet.

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