the.com/digestive tract
A thirty-foot tube you spend your whole life trusting with strangers' cooking.
means The continuous passage running from mouth to anus — mouth, esophagus, stomach, small and large intestines — that breaks food down and absorbs what your body needs before discarding the rest.
from "Digestive" traces back to Latin digerere, "to carry apart, divide, dissolve" — di- (apart) plus gerere (to carry) — the same verb that gives us the whole notion of sorting and organizing something into its proper places. "Tract" comes from Latin tractus, "a drawing out, a stretch or extent," from trahere, "to pull or draw" (the ancestor of "traction" and "tractor" too). So the phrase is quietly literal: a drawn-out stretch of anatomy devoted to pulling food apart.
- actual length
- about 30 feet, mouth to exit
- technically outside
- it is a tube through you, not inside you
- second brain
- lined with 500 million neurons, its own nervous system
- stomach acid
- strong enough to dissolve metal, kept in check by mucus