I kinda disagree with this one. I know many pet animals (especially dogs) that will live up to this, but I also know plenty that will never eat anything again that they associate with being sick.
And as for humans, I (and most people I know) have foods we know are going to leave us . . . digestively unhappy? . . . but we love them anyway. Otherwise there would be far less business for Beano, Lactaid, or just handfuls of GasX.
Or in the immortal words of a friend after a doctor’s visit where he was told to give up ‘spicy food, acidic food, caffeine, and dairy,’ he replied “Well, that’s not going to happen, so let’s talk alternatives!”
ETA - not that I’m telling people to avoid their Doctor’s advice, but some people put quality of life first. And in his case, the digestive issues had to do more with his horrible word stress - which were greatly relieved with different meds for the cause.
Thanks but I am not convinced. To me, your claim : “… Individuals that have such an instinct will have tended to survive and reproduce more successfully.” and the claims in the article which says that individuals who could throw (including their fecal matter further ) were better communicators and had natural selection in the favor - these two claims seem contrary.
I don’t see how. Humans and some other primates evolved to throw things, yes. Not for playing throw and catch, but throwing rocks or other projectiles at enemies and prey.
Some primates in captivity throw faeces seemingly out of annoyance and aggression; they are not throwing delicious treats as an expression of love.
Outside of captivity, poop throwing seems rare. I have not investigated under what circumstances howler monkeys throw poop because I was not trying to make a claim about all animal species.
The argument was simply that physical disgust is largely a function of what things are likely to make us sick. Since faeces commonly house harmful bacteria and other pathogens, it’s unsurprising that many species exhibit faecal avoidance behavior.
And consequently not surprising that to a human, human poop is extremely disgusting.
Again I will state: the food that nature intended for them. Though humans are omnivorous in that we’re both carnivore and herbivore, our diets are supposed to be much plant-heavier than the modern diet is, and stuff like potato chips and velveeta was never part of our evolution. Even today, not all of us have evolved to handle dairy.
This is not a moral judgment on whether people ought to be vegetarian, just the correct and uncontroversial observation that many of us modern humans are eating stuff we didn’t evolve to eat. And when we do, it makes our feces more odorous and poorly-formed.
But there is a mental factor about it. If I told you I fertilized my garden with cow manure, most of you wouldn’t think anything of it. If I told you I used raw human shit to fertilize my garden, I think many of you would not eat the vegetables that came from it.
I don’t care what sort of manure goes on my crops as long as I know it’s been composted as it should be. I don’t think most people do either. Manure is different from raw shit. Of course people don’t give this much thought, and the first time they do, maybe they’re thinking of watermelons sitting in a pile of nutty logs, but I doubt they’d have any problem looking at correctly processed compost.
Historically it’s been very common for farmers to use so-called “night soil” or sewage to fertilize their crops. People who are grossed out by it simply haven’t been culturally acclimated to it.
But I wouldn’t eat vegetables fertilized with dog shit or cat shit, either. Took much risk of catching something. And it’s pretty nasty stuff. Also, I’d prefer the cow shit be composted before getting close to my veggies.
I used to buy composted human manure to fertilize a flower bed next to the street. (Milorganite). It was pretty unobjectionable. If it were convenient, I’d use it again. But not for food crops. That seems too risky.
I was thinking of Chinese cuisine. I’ll poke around for cites, but i think it’s pretty well accepted that using night soil for raw produce is a health risk.
There are already a surprising number of humanoids who engage in urophagia (drinking urine for imagined health benefits), so why not coprophagia?
“As it turns out, feces is quite a complex substance. In addition to the waste of digested foods, there is actually quite a bit of useful material to reclaim from it: undigested or unabsorbed proteins, fats, carbohydrates, micronutrients such as vitamins and minerals, and even some enzymes. There is fiber, water, and dead cells from the body in there—such as red blood cells and cells from the intestinal lining—not to mention many of the microorganisms living in the gastrointestinal tract.”
“Often around 50 percent of the original energy contained in the ingested food is still left in the fecal matter, so there’s quite some recon potential.”
Just considering the beneficial bacterial flora some people have (the basis for fecal transplantation), there are health benefits to poop-eating. I can’t understand why a savvy entrepreneur hasn’t figured out a way to de-stenchify and successfully market the stuff to the woo crowd.
I suspect eating raw vegetables is a modern Western influence, peeled or not. Both my maternal and paternal grandparents, all born in the late 1800’s, never ate a salad or any raw vegetables. Thinking about it, when my grandmothers prepared a meal, there were never any raw vegetables on the table.
Edit: Just realized, a few raw vegetables were used. Shredded daikon (Japanese radish), shredded cabbage and grated ginger. And never in my grandmother’s food, but grated wasabi would be an old staple. Namasu (a slightly pickled salad ala cole slaw) usually included shredded carrots.
Unless you lived on a farm or lived close to one, having access to fresh vegetables in olden times would be rare. Multiple types of tsukemono (pickled vegetables) is a staple of every Japanese meal.
I can’t find a cite for the origin of tsukemono, but here’s one for banchan, the Korean equivalent:
While the countries surrounding Korea were preserving foods with their abundance of livestock resources, Korea was forced to utilize another way to safeguard their resources. Due to their focus on agriculture, the main ingredients in their fermented foods were grains and vegetables.[4] The fermentation process is necessary as most parts of the Korean peninsula are isolated by mountains from all sides. Additionally, this process of fermentation can be used to enrich the flavor profile of food with the use of gochujang.[4] Kimchi is a perfect example of this enriched food utilizing the flavor and fermentation process together. Therefore, banchan is mainly seasoned with fermented soy products, medicinal herbs, and sesame or perilla oils.[4]
Interestingly, AFAIK, the Chinese don’t have a large variety of pickled/preserved vegetables. Possibly because of the country’s early development of widespread transport systems.
Because faeces is harmful to us, our own urine is usually not.
I don’t think my point is very controversial, and this is why people keep deflecting on to other things: Nothing is objectively icky, but we have a feeling of physical disgust and it has evolved to be triggered by things that could make us ill in our natural environment, such as poop, but also vomit, many rotten foods, dead bodies and so on.
Otherwise…OMG what a coincidence.
No there isn’t. Fecal transplants don’t work like that, and the result of a human centipede would be one person dragging along several dead bodies behind him.
The fact that with modern technology there may be ways of processing poop to reclaim some of the nutrients or even process it into some kind of food source is not at all the same thing as saying we can eat poop.
It would be like saying that seawater is a perfectly sound way of hydrating; it just needs a salination filter. The fact that technology is required concedes the point.
A few years ago we took a balloon ride over the Serengetti, and as we went over the hippo pond, the pilot said “I’d go lower but then we’d never get the smell out off the basket.” Yes, they make their own keep-away defense.
If you see a dog dragging their ass on the ground, it’s glandular. As if dog poop was not enough, some animals sign their work (so to speak) by adding some scent from glands in their anus squeezed out during the log-rolling event. In some animals (think skunks) this has evolved to a very extreme self-defense mechanism. For dogs, it’s more of a personal signature, their own personalized fragrance - much like Chanel or Old Spice for humans. This is why dogs sniff each other’s ass - to put a face to the name, so to speak. Sometimes the glands will clog up, and become inflamed, and itch. This is why dogs drag their butts. The alternative is to take them to a vet, who has the joyful task of squeezing their anal glands to unclog them and release the pressure. (So I hear - I don’t own a dog)
But yes, many animals are not as fastidious as humans. (some are). But it appears that many diseases (and parasites) have evolved to use the human digestive system as a means to redistribute themselves (perhaps like civets and coffee beans?) and the tendency of humans to live in groups has encouraged this means of spreading disease. So along with this humans have developed a distaste for close encounters with their output.
I’ve seen my dogs drag their butt to get rid of the dingleberries hanging there. The worse is when you see it and as you approach them, they happily sit down to wait for you! With our Maltese, it usually turned from a butt wash, to a “Oh what the heck!” full bath.
I’ve expressed our dogs glands a few times while giving them a bath. Believe me, it’s worse than you think it would be!
Not quite direct poo-to-public consumption, but in western Java (at least, probably further afield) there is a delicacy, a fresh water fish known in Bahasa Indonesia as “Ikan Mas” (translates to gold fish)
These are bream similar to ( and related to ) Koi fish.
In my travels off the beaten track in the area, I often saw, in the villages, the family “goldfish” pond, into which all excrement was deposited, often with a small private room mounted next to the pond in order to do so.
I was never brave enough to order Ikan Mas from a roadside stall.
Also it was significantly more expensive than normal vendor offerings.
But there we have the pure form of the cycle:
fish to food to poo to food for fish to fish to food for people to poo… ad infinitum
I wonder if we see it as “ickier” also simply because it is from humans - sort of analogous to the difference between seeing animal roadkill vs (if such a thing routinely happened) seeing a random human stranger as roadkill.