Waste. The very word implies something that is unwanted or not needed. Call it leftovers, trash, byproducts, garbage – it all means the same thing – something left over from something else after all of the useful elements of that something else have been extracted.
What do we do with that waste? Well, most of the time, we discard it. We throw it away without a second thought and feel assured that it’s gone forever. Not so. As Mike Nowak, a Chicago radio gardening show host once stated, our planet is a closed system. Everything you discard still remains on Earth somewhere. There is no such thing as “away.”
Much of this waste also ends up back in our bodies, sometimes indirectly in the air we breathe or substances we absorb through our skin, but sometimes directly and by design. What do I mean by this? Allow me to elaborate.
What do we mix into our soil to help boost the growth of our vegetables? Manure. What is manure? You know good and well what it is. It’s POOP! Yes folks, cows and horses are excreting the unusable portions of the food they eat (a.k.a. poop) out of their butts. And we willingly collect it, dry it, spread it onto our vegetable gardens, grow vegetables, put those vegetables in our mouths, chew them up and swallow them. This is considered a good thing – and it is. But whether it’s via tomato road or jalapeño highway, in the end, we are still eating poop.
Nauseated yet? Well, to paraphrase that tune by the Carpenters, I’ve only just begun. Do you like cheese? You know how cheese is made, of course. Bacterial culture is added to milk, which causes the milk to separate into curds and whey. We then extract the whey, compress and age the curds, and that gives us cheese. But what do the bacteria do? Some bacteria is used to start the cheesemaking process. They will chew up the milk sugar (lactose), convert it to lactic acid, and excrete that lactic acid into the milk. The acid lowers the pH of the milk and creates the right conditions for coagulation of the milk. Other bacteria roam through the ripening curd, chew up the material inside and excrete salts and other acids. Well what is all this stuff that the bacteria are excreting? You can call it salt, acid, whatever pleases you. But bottom line, it is still waste product that the bacteria expel from their little bodies. In other words – bacterial poop! And we consume it with gusto!
Now I tell you all this not to disgust you. Well, maybe a little. Fine, I admit it. I’m rolling on the floor as I imagine the looks on all of your faces as you’re reading this! We all need a hobby, and I’m working mine. But all kidding aside, it’s important that we remember that food – real, honest to goodness food – does not spontaneously erupt from the shelves of your local grocer in neat and pretty packages. There is real work, effort, and ancient knowledge that goes into the development of that food long before it ever reaches the grocery store. To the urbanized eye, it is not all neat, pretty, and sweet-smelling. But without it, we would all have no choice but to eat the packaged, artificially created, chemically laden stuff that’s already a large part of most of our diets. And what those excuses for food can do to our bodies is a lot more disgusting than a little poop could ever be!
the garden troubadour 