Personally I never thought much about shit. Like most people, I thought it was mostly just something that everyone does and that it was a bit unsanitary. However, I was always curious about how humans were able to turn the food we eat into something so unrecognizable and smelly. I have also wondered why we did not use human excrement as a fertilizer on a mass scale which I got my answer to in Gerling’s reading.
When I read Gerling’s excerpt from Food, Culture, & Society I immediately thought of two scenes from the movie The Help. In one scene, the white employer of a black housekeeper argues that “colored” help should use a separate bathroom outside of the house because “they carry different diseases than we do” and it’s unsanitary (The Help). In a subsequent scene, the same housekeeper uses the employer’s bathroom instead of the outside one, and the employer, in a fit of rage, fires the housekeeper on the spot.This is ironic because her help is allowed to take care of their children, cook for them (eating food touched by their hands), and clean her house. Yet shitting in their bathroom was deemed unsanitary? I guess this was just a step too far, given feces I would say is considered the most unsanitary bodily function. I know this is a movie and not real life, but I still find it interesting that they decided to keep this in the final cut of the movie, even if discriminatory practices like this did not happen it still stands out. This then leads me to think segregated bathrooms in the era of Jim Crow laws where blacks and whites could not share the same bathroom, which I thought, up until recently, was just because everything was separated by race, but I am now realizing the introduction of the indoor toilet and plumbing have more significant historical roots.