https://munchies.vice.com/en/articles/we...ter-future
I am not sure if i should laugh or cry. The world will really suck if these guys ever are in charge. The Voxsplaining:
The author:
My take:
I am not sure if i should laugh or cry. The world will really suck if these guys ever are in charge. The Voxsplaining:
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But I wonder if we cannot and should not go further. Why stop at insects? Why be satisfied with their admittedly glowing report card of optimized efficiency when we could go all the way? The logical conclusion of this train of thought, as far as I can see, is clear: Let us engineer the perfect closed loop. Let us eat, and only eat, our own poop.
This modest pooposal is not as far-fetched as it might first sound. So let me try to nip any doubts in the bud. A common objection often involves nutritional composition. How would feces ever be nutritive enough to sustain the life from which it came? The key lies in processing. 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.
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Animal ethics—and indeed plant ethics—will become a moot point. The only organisms we will need to use for our own sustenance will be a handful of microbes, which don’t even really count as ‘other’ because they are already a part of our bodies. Ultimately, it will be a fun and by no means insurmountable design challenge to come up with a broad array of approaches to ensure reclamation stays at, or even exceeds, 100 percent. That’s what #Innovation and Silicon Valley are for.
Even though fecal recycling is demonstrably possible, the primary objection at this point has to do with disgust. Who would eat it? Many are skeptical we could get our entire species to start eating their own excrement, but the psychological research suggests that humans’ disgust towards feces is not innate but learned, and thus may be unlearned as well.
For a start, many animals already exhibit what is known as coprophagia, or the eating of feces. Elephants, hippos, koalas, pandas, and others are born with sterile digestive tracts, and the young eat their mother’s feces in order to inoculate their own intestines with the right microbes. Dogs, rabbits, monkeys, and others have also been observed eating feces, of their own and other species (god knows what for, but they do).
As for human culture, it can alter designations of disgust quite quickly. Look at the recent debate around so-called ‘recycled water’, or water reclaimed from sewage through an extensive process of filtration and sanitation. Though recycled water comes out much purer than regular tap water, at first, many people would refuse to drink it. But this response is starting to change. And if we can learn anything from the history of food processing and marketing, it is that abstracting foods into different forms can be a highly effective way to get people to eat them. Consider, say, cricket flour, or fractionated black soldier fly fat.
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Why be reformist when we can be revolutionary? Why wait for doom when we can rise up and choose our fate? No, my friends: the dream of complete self-sufficiency is within our grasp, and it begins, ineluctably, at our anuses.
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Josh Evans is a graduate student at Cambridge. He was formerly the lead researcher at Nordic Food Lab in Copenhagen and is featured in the documentary film, BUGS.
My take: