reading and eating

this evening i'm eating and reading at the same time. i'm eating delicatta squash and buckwheat topped with a dash of maple syrup and reading about shit. the book is the humanure handbook by joseph jenkins. i've been fascinated by crap since i was a kid. i'm admitting a lot here! as a child i once got all my friends to crap in buckets out behind our family's garage. very much the young scientist i was fascinated by how each kids poop looked completely different. one of my friend's mother caught us all "in the laboratory" and wanted to know if my mom thought this was okay. i answered authoritatively, "yes!" i never heard a thing about it from the higher ups. looking back, i think what could be more natural than curiosity about this stuff that comes out of us all? jenkins book is about how our culture, western that is, has been fecophobic for centuries and has paid for that phobia dearly and needlessly in countless illnesses and deaths. our habit of crapping in purified drinking water (the stuff in your toilet) and then flushing the blackwater away to who-knows-where (most likely back into drinking water sources) is the culmination of centuries of fear and loathing of the human turd. what the west has failed to realize, according to jenkins, the east has handily mastered for millennia: human waste is valuable and safe if handled consciencously. rural korean outhouses are often decorated to attract users. what makes poop praiseworthy? if properly managed, it transforms into rich and nutritious humus, the stuff plants love to grow in--it can be made into the sweetest and least expensive plant elixir there is making the soil from which we eat richer than it was before. jenkins discusses at length the processes necessary to make human waste safe. it turns out that most wastewater processing plants at the end of all our western flushes accomplish less than a simple compost pile in a backyard. by composting humanure all human pathogens can be completely destroyed. depending on the type of composting humanure can be made safe in a matter of weeks or a couple years. what is most important is consciousness about composting, and from my casual survey most people don't know much at all about it, except that you're supposed to turn them--which isn't necessarily true! i highly recommend this book. it'll shed a lot of light into that place where the sun never shines. eating dinner while reading it...well, that depends on your constitution.