Following my posts on humanure composting, and spirulina cultivation using urine, I was confronted with the obvious question:
What's up with all that sh*t?
Why would anyone go through all the trouble of using our body's waste products to create something useful (such as nutritious food)?
To answer this valid question I'd like to apply the same mindset I would to anything else: why use any type of waste product if something useful can be made out of it? Using empty beer cans and discarded pallets to make a solar dehydrator, for example? Or using tires to build a wall, as it's done with Earthships. I once talked to a blacksmith who makes knives, swords and other blades out of junked cars. But it's done even industrially, for example certain pharmaceuticals can be made from cherry pits, the waste product of the canning industry. What's trash to one is a resource to another. This is especially true if we're talking about various species.
The Nutrient Cycle in Very Basic Terms
We as living organisms need food to survive. Our spent and dying cells need to be replaced with new ones, and they need to perform their functions properly. Energy is also a need, but by no means the only one. For all these reasons we need to acquire the right nutrients, in their right form. However, in our natural environment it is very unlikely to find just the right vitamin or amino acid floating our way. Usually the nutrients come in form of some other organism of plant or animal nature, or as some of their products, such as milk or honey. In order to get the nutrients our bodies need, we need to break up our food into their basic building blocks, which our bodies reassemble into a form that's most useful for it, that is parts of itself.
Naturally, the body can not use everything, so whatever is left over after digestion is excreted for someone else to use. Waste is unknown to nature, and eventually everything is used by someone (or something, though I generally tend to refer to all species and forces of nature as “people”). In the end, even our bodies become prey to a predator, or in our cases more likely to a disease, or simply to the gradual inefficiency that comes with aging. Once we die, we are also disassembled into our components, whether we are buried underground, get dumped overboard in a nautical funeral, or turned into heat, smoke, and ashes in a cremation. Eventually, these residue substances become part of some other organism, which practices metabolism, that is turning one substance into another, and eventually dies to feed another one, and so on, and so on.
But still: turning your excrement into food?
Of course, what else would we feed our veggies with (or our corn-fields, or our fruit trees, or the pastures our livestock graze on)? Since the dawn of agriculture, we have been fertilizing our crops with our waste products, and the waste products of our animals, as well as that of our plants. If you think about composting, that's all it is: Using leaves, straw, weeds, kitchen scraps, etc. to turn them into nutrient rich soil, where new plants will grow. Of course those plants, just like us, need the right form of nutrients. Unlike us, they don't have a complex digestive system, so whatever they can access through their roots is all they can get. Similarly to us, however, the species that do the digestion for them are micro-organisms, living not on the inside as in our case, but around them, in a healthy soil. To make sure the soil stays healthy, nutrients need to be added regularly.
Up until recently, when we figured out how to create synthetic fertilizer, the nutrients for our plants (and thus our soil) came from manure, human or other animals. This recently discovered alternative not only makes us even more dependent on fossil fuel energy, but it changes our attitude toward our human manure from a valuable resource to a nasty problem.
Taking Care of Business
Throughout the years our cultures have come up with many different ways of dealing with this “problem”. Not too long ago, it was simply tossed out of the window, potentially soiling anyone passing by in the streets. This is, by the way, how the Spanish word aguas! (literally waters, but meaning watch out!) came about: People would yell it before dumping their chamber pots into the streets. How lovely!
In less primitive cultures, such as in China, peasants would pay townspeople money for night-soil. Supposedly German settlers had the most coveted, and highly paid night-soil, as their diet made it especially nutritious. Sure, it may sound disgusting, but in a place with high population density, and before the advent of chemical fertilizer, an essential part of eating.
Finally, about a century ago, certain innovative minds came up with the flush toilet. That system was merely a more sophisticated way of throwing your wastes out. Instead of the window, an elaborate system of sewers would lead the unwanted substances, at a huge expense of water, ... into some place further away. Unfortunately, while they may be “treated” (that is subjected to anaerobic decomposition) their nutritional properties would remain unutilised.
So again, why am I so passionate about composting, recycling, humanure, and Spirulina cultivation (using urine)?
- Because I like to see the potential in things, even if it's not for myself.
- Because I don't like to see good food getting wasted, even if I'm not to one to eat it.
- Because I don't believe there is an 'away' to throw unwanted things.
- Because I like to turn “disagreeable” things into more “agreeable” ones.
- Because it just feels great to produce seemingly without cost (such as feeding Spirulina with urine).
- Because I don't like to rely on complex, inefficient, expensive, and fallible systems (such as our sewer grid).
- Because even though many aspects of my own life are far from sustainable, I'd like to change them gradually, while demonstrating for others what is possible.