Sanitation professionals sometimes divide the world into faecal-phobic and faecal-philiac cultures. India is the former (though only when the dung is not from cows); China is definitely and blithely the latter.
- from The Big Necessity by Rose George
The Chinese use biogas to cook, clean and light up their houses. Biogas is produced in-house from a mix of human and pig excreta. Units called digesters essentially convert the poop into essential fuel and houses in rural areas have this facility. The Chinese are not squeamish about poop. In rural areas they have open door loos called Ni Hao or Hello and you can chat while you download your brown load. Interesting. In fact in the early part of the 20th Century, the folks in the business of carrying fertile poop to the farmers were called “Shit Lords” and a gangster’s moll who controlled the flow of poopilizer in the Shanghai docks was called the Queen of Poop. Both the parties didn’t particularly mind their nicknames.
Now coming to India, our battle against caste system begins and ends with poop. We’ve looked upon it with disgust and crinkled our noses at the folks who carried it away from our homes. A common “cure” for being touched by the shadow of an untouchable was to ingest cow dung and cow pee, and that’s just nuts, or a load of bull, and I can’t seem to get past poop cliches.
So Rose George is right. We are squeamish. They are not. The truth is that we are running out of fuel and they’ve figured how to make their own. India imports crops, China’s paddy fields are doing Tai Chi Chuan in happiness. The Chinese are proud of their fruits. They say that Night Soil or poop used as fertilizer makes their fruits juicier.
And just for that, I will stay away from Chinese Apples. They are perfect, big, green and crunchy and with a little too much happiness than I can handle.
Rose George’s book The Big Necessity: Adventures in the World of Human Waste is all about poop – where it goes, where it should go, what it does, what it should do and a whole lot more. I’m half way through the book and we have traveled half way around the world from the biogas plants of China to the Sulabhs of India, the overflowing loos of South African schools to the sewers of London and New York. And she makes a fantastic traveling companion. She’s funny, insightful and full of curiosity. It helps she’s a good writer.
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