Other than the obvious grossness of it, why can’t we just process human poop into Cliff Bars with additional nutrients and ship it as food aid to places that need it. And then help various 3rd world countries to set up their own poop processing facilities?
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Because it is easier to grow food from seeds than it is to reprocess poop into nutritious food. At least right now.
Even in developing countries it is easier to grow food than it is to figure out the science of turning poop into food. Anyone can grow seeds. A special factory that turns poop into food – which basically reverses digestion – is complicated. It needs clever scientists and engineers. It is easier to have farmers.
We produce more food than we eat as a species. Food shortages and famines are all produced by politics and conflict, not a lack of food.
the reason it’s called waste is because your digestive system absorbs the nutrients as it passes through. what’s left doesn’t have much nutritional value
waste is what is left after the body has extracted the nutrients it can extract. To makes it food those nutrients has to be added back in
you can add those nutrients by use the waste as fertiliser for plants and eat the plants …
I’d like to address the part about helping people. I can see you’re looking for solutions to a very big problem.
We have other options. [Restore land](https://www.tiktok.com/@justdiggit) so it can be used for agriculture. Support local communities over multinational corporations (eg stop sending missionaries to build things and hire locals instead). Give the UN more resources to step in during famines. Etc.
We should do all the things we can do *before we offer poor people human poop to eat.* It’d be pretty poor form for a rich country to tell a poor country, “We have a lot of food, but all we’re willing to share with you is poop.”
Hungry, poor, homeless, and sick people deserve to be treated with dignity. Some charities won’t take clothes with stains or holes. Some soup kitchens serve vegetarian meals, even though they could just tell everyone to eat meat. The question isn’t, “What’s the minimum people need to survive?” It’s, “What’s the best we can do for people?”
Feces contain several classes of nitrogen and sulfur containing compounds for which then human nose is extremely sensitive, and which almost everyone finds unpleasant or offensive. These compounds are produced at low levels by bacteria in the colon.
At present it’s simply not practical to remove all such compounds from byproducts from feces. Remember that even at very low levels which are hard to measure by very sensitive analytic equipment, such compounds are perceptibly unpleasant to the nose.
The same reason you can’t reprocess a candy wrapper back into candy. You eat the candy and throw away the wrapper because it doesn’t have any of the sugar or the chocolate, that’s part of the candy’s “waste”. When you eat food, your body uses the nutrients it has and throws away the rest because it doesn’t have any of the proteins or vitamins, that’s part of the food’s waste. Everything in your poo is the part of food your body didn’t need to use, just like everything in the candy wrapper is the part of the candy that you don’t need to use. The candy wrapper is a part of the candy but it’s not the actual candy itself, your poo is part of the food but it’s not the actual food itself.
Your shit is mostly dead bacteria and nonfood. That can’t be made into food.
Night soil is when human shit is used to grow delicious vegetables.
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