I personally don’t like poop at all, I don’t even like to go to the bathroom. I find bathrooms mostly uncomfortable unless it’s like a bath or shower. Public restrooms are like my nightmare, and when I worked at a diner I had to clean the bathroom and it was the worst. I think I come from a privileged place to not have had to clean bathrooms, most likely because I’m a cis male, most people haven’t had to make me clean bathrooms that often. I really don’t know what to say, I just hate bathrooms. I think my hate of bathrooms stems from my OCD. With that all said bathrooms gross me out, but talking about poop isn’t that bad. 

I never thought I would be thinking this indepthly about a word I hear often and associate with the nasty and unwanted. It’s wild to me that there once was a time before we knew anything about being “dirty” or germs where we would have been comfortable announcing to the world that the smelly thing that comes out of us after we eat should be something we harvest and eat… Something I thought of after class was that in this day and age people would trust eating their own shit more. Sounds weird but hear me out, imagine you know nothing you know now about your body and how it works and imagine using the bathroom. Would one of the thoughts that crossed your mind really be ‘how do I eat this??’ Now with all our technology and knowledge now, especially if someone like Elon Musk for example was to put out an announcement about his new planet saving invention that ‘recycles all human waste’ people would be all over it. Just an interesting thought and not something that feels too far fetched. As someone pointed out in class, we already are drinking filtered pee. Though one of the blog posts I just read made a very good point about it being a lot closer to water and therefore a lot easier to comprehend. I guess the conclusion to all of this is that I still don’t know what side I agree with more. The idea and everything icks me out but I could also trust some of the tech to completely change it. Who knows what our future holds. I just hope it’s a lot less shitty.

When toilets first began only the wealthy people had them. If you weren’t part of the upper class, it took years for you to get it in your homes. Having toilets were a sign of wealth, if you had one then it was implicated you had money. Cleaning the toilet was a female job, which I think is one of the nastiest thing to do. Cleaning after the household’s body fluids is gross. Why should the women have to be the one to take care of the toilet, it should’ve been who ever used it clean after themselves. Making jobs for just women is stupid. Whoever lives in the home should be responsible for their things. Yes, women are expected to stay home to clean and cook but there should be a boarder line on how much they have to do. If there are children around, they can pick up a chore and make the mom’s job a little easier. Team work makes the dream work, we shouldn’t have the women wore down from caring for children, cleaning, and cooking.

This past spring I spent 3 months on a conservation corps where we were camping in pretty remote areas and had no access to plumbing. We did have pit toilets at about half of our camp sites, but the other half of the time we would just go out into the woods. There was a big emphasis across all of our day to day activities on “leave no trace”, so as to not mess up the environment with our human impact. This really made sense when it came to food wrappers and man-made trash, but it felt a little bit different when it came to shit, and I still don’t really know where I stand on it. At the sites where we didn’t have pit toilets, we were very far from civilization- not even at any established camp site. We would be told to make sure to dig cat holes whenever we went to the bathroom, and not go in the same place twice, and go a specific number of yards from any body of water (even the ones that we were never getting drinking water from), and just to take all sorts of precautionary measures around our bathroom habits, and I didn’t quite get the point. It got pretty old when you were making sure to pay attention to all those different requirements every day for months. Of course, I understand that these measures are good rules of thumb in general for camping and hiking, because if there were too many people just shitting all over the place it would be pretty unpleasant and potentially bad for human health and the health of the ecosystem. But, in my specific scenario, there were 4 people on my crew, out in the middle of the woods, and there was this general feeling that permeated all of our shit related conversations that we would be doing something extremely unclean and bad for the health of the environment if we didn’t follow the correct shit procedures. There were deer, bears, squirrels, and all sorts of other wildlife in those woods who were going about their business without thinking about any of that. Isn’t shitting a natural part of life and of the environment? It felt to me that our learned beliefs about poop as a shameful and unclean thing were affecting the way that we were thinking about it as it pertained to “leave no trace”. At the same time, I don’t really know enough about what the potential consequences of shitting freely in the woods may be, so they might exist. I can’t really say.

Even just from reading the word shit, it is hard to not have a visceral reaction and want to no longer think about it. However, our readings this week, class discussion, and Kern tour offered me some insight into seeing shit in a slightly less shitty way. In reference to the aspects of the readings that discussed seeing shit as a resource, that really intrigued me. Not sure if I feel totally comfortable with the idea of eating food made from human shit, but with proper safety precautions, it is a neat idea. During our class discussions when people brought up urine, spit, and tears still being a form of human waste, I noticed my reaction to them was distinctly different compared to shit. These three things feel way less daunting, as they are all some sort of fluid, therefore I feel like I can easily connect them to water. However, when it comes to shit, it feels hard to connect it to food, but rather it feels like an entirely different category in my brain. Therefore, the idea mentioned of food being pre-shit and shit being post-food was fascinating to think about. To put a basic need like food and elevate it as a marker of social status, when it all goes to the same place in the end seems kind of ironic. For example, a five-course meal and a bag of Cheetos getting turned into the same thing is kind of funny when you think about it. One thing I thought of after our class discussion was the difference in reaction to specifically snacky foods such as chips or cookies based on class, as well as the idea of on or off-brand foods. In general, having the off-brand of something is looked down upon in society. In my own life, my grandparents are very committed to certain name brands and refuse to buy alternatives. In general, healthy foods are often associated with middle to upper-class lifestyles, but I think it is interesting how this changes a bit in the context of hosting others. For example, if one were to have a party, name-brand snacks like Lays chips or Oreo cookies would be the first picks. The emphasis on the name-brands here I think is very important, because if these individuals had off-brands, there would be a different response and possible hesitation from others when engaging with the food, because of expectations of what they should have. Yet, someone in a lower class would be frowned upon if they were consuming these same things, just because they are consistently living off of them. But, if they had off-brand versions of the same foods, it would be expected because of their social position. Finally, our tour of the Kern made me very interested in the idea of composting toilets. Seeing the thought process behind the decision to get them and the literal mechanics of how they work made me thrilled to have them on campus and definitely one of the first things I will show guests who come to visit me. Overall, the readings, class discussions, and our Kern tour shifted my feelings on shit.

Often humans believe shit is gross. Whether it’s the shit we let out in our toilets or what is seen on the streets. Yes, it smells horrific and looks nasty, especially diarrhea but when it’s poop from an infant, animal or a beloved pet of ours we accept it. When our children, nieces, nephews, or child we baby sit poops its our job to change them. We are aware that they need are assistance and they can’t use the bathroom on their own so we take initiative and help them out. We smell the nastiness but its not as bad as dealing with poop out of our confort zone. For instance wild animals shit in public and we are okay with it because that their natural bathroom. We may walk around it but we don’t mind it because we think that’s normal. When it come to our personal pets we are okay with picking up their poop versus a stranger’s dog. We only deal with poop in our confort zone and when it doesn’t seem “normal” poop can be the nastiest thing in the world.

What do your everyday behaviors around shit reveal about our culture, history, or power relations, broadly defined? You can use the main themes of the readings as a starting point if you wish, such as Gerling’s connections with indoor plumbing and colonialism and racial hierarchies, or Simmons’ resurfacing of utopian socialist thought from 19^th century French theorists who saw shit as a resource, but feel free to excrete other shitty connections if you feel so moved.

Readings from this week:

Pliny, The Natural History, Book XXVIII, Chapters 13, 18.

https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0137%3Abook%3D28%3Achapter%3D13

https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0137%3Abook%3D28%3Achapter%3D18

Gerling, Daniel Max. “Excrementalisms: Revaluing What We Have Only Ever Known as Waste.” Food, Culture & Society 22, no. 5 (2019): 622–38. https://doi.org/10.1080/15528014.2019.1638126.

Simmons, Dana. “Waste Not, Want Not: Excrement and Economy in Nineteenth-Century France.” Representations 96, no. 1 (November 1, 2006): 73–98. https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2006.96.1.73.