One mans shit is another ones soil

Biomass is biomass, doesn’t really matter where it comes from. My family is huge into composting, so I’m used to dealing with large amounts of the slimy detritus of what used to be food. It doesn’t smell good, and might make you throw up if you eat it, but just wash your hands if you get any on you and you’ll be fine. While theoretically I should feel the same way about digested food as I do decomposed food, I still have a higher level of suspicion around shit than compost. I think this, at least to me, has to do with the way each one is produced. The experience of generating a banana peel is a lot more pleasant than generating a nasty shit. One of these is a joyous, nutritious, flavorful experience, whereas the other one is a chore at best and a soul-destroying, painful, and messy process at worst. In our tour of the Kern, our guide (whose name I am completely blanking on right now) told us that while we can use the products of the composting toilets for planting decorative plants, we can’t plant anything edible. This makes some sense, there isn’t a lot of science out there about what exactly bioaccumulates in human shit and if/how that gets transferred to plants grown in it, but our guide also mentioned that there were some people suggesting the composted shit be allowed to cure even longer before they start planting. To me, this comes from a seed of legitimate fear, but peoples projection of bad memories of how shit is created leads to these fears being overblown, leading to less interest in studying how to best use this untapped resource.