Don't Waste Your Waste

Ever just feel the need to tell someone to "eat s***"? Well, now you can do that and it's actually a possibility for them, thanks to some Japanese scientists who "...have actually discovered a way to create edible steaks from human feces." Oh, Japan. Is there anything that you can't do?

According to an article over at Yahoo! News, a one "Mitsuyuki Ikeda, a researcher from the Okayama Laboratory, has developed steaks based on proteins from human excrement." That's right. There are proteins in your poop. It's really not so much "Who knew?" as much as it is "Who cares? But I'll tell you who cared. Tokyo Sewage, that's who. Well, they might not have cared about the protein part, but they were concerned about the poop part. They had too much sewage mud. So they went to a wacky Japanese scientist and asked him what he could do with it. I don't know that they were expecting to get lunch out of the deal, but that seems to be what has happened.

I'm going to just interject a thought right here. What's wrong with fertilizer? Isn't poop good fertilizer? Don't they have crops that need...boosting or whatever you want to call it? Why wasn't fertilizer this scientist's first thought? How come he went right to"I wonder if we could eat it?"

I guess the poop, er, sewage had a lot of bacteria in it because there was a lot of protein in it. That's when they "... extracted those proteins, combined them with a reaction enhancer and put it in an exploder which created the artificial steak." OK, I think that someone is taking their liberties just a bit too far to start describing this stuff as "steak". Seriously? I'm thinking that if you're going to go with anything other than poo, you really can't just jump to "steak". They claim that "The “meat” is 63% proteins, 25% carbohydrates, 3% lipids and 9% minerals." Hmm. Now, if I read that right, the sewage is where the protein was. So that means that almost two-thirds of this little treat comes from waste. I don't even want to KNOW where the carbohydrates come from, so don't bother asking. I am NOT researching THAT.

And get this: "The scientists hope to price it the same as actual meat, but at the moment the excrement steaks are ten to twenty times the price they should be thanks to the cost of research." Ten to TWENTY times MORE than REAL meat?! No thanks! I don't care how many greenhouse gases this would eliminate! I'm not paying twenty times more than I need to in order to eat a burger made out of poo! What say I pay twenty times less than that and get a meal with NO POO in it? OK?

This scientist claims to understand "...the psychological barriers that need to be surmounted knowing that your food is made from human feces." Wow. Psychological barriers. That might be the understatement of my lifetime. But do you know what they're hoping will persuade people to dive right in? They're hoping that "...people will be able to overlook that ugly detail in favor of perks like environmental responsibility, cost and the fact that the meat will have fewer calories."

Environmental responsibility? I recycle, for cryin' out loud! I feel as if I'm doing my part. I am not going above and beyond sorting out my cans and bottles by eating a s*** sandwich! Al Gore weighs four hundred pounds and I'll bet that he wouldn't eat one of those things either. And are they really going to throw the "fewer calories" at us? Seriously, this thing could make me drop twenty pounds each time I ate it and I still wouldn't touch it. You know why? Because it's made of human excrement, that is correct! And do you know what has even fewer calories than eating the Japanese s*** sandwich? NOT eating the Japanese s*** sandwich.

This is a terrible idea that needs to be filed away in the "They Mean Well" category. There are plenty of other examples out there of things that were made, but they just didn't turn out so well. The Yugo. A McPizza. Geometry. All had humble beginnings but just never really panned out. This needs to go in that category. Immediately.

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