I have a thorough understanding of biology and the workings of the human body.

If only it were possible to separate the shit from food before eating it—think how much more convenient things would be.

Comments

[Standpipe Bridgeplate]

This is easy to do. First prepare a benchmark meal and eat it, remembering to save the relevant by-products. Now prepare the same meal again and render it liquid. Suspend the Euphemous Material in the meal-potion using cheesecloth, or a spice ball, or similar, taking care to center the mass. And voilà: as like attracts like, the waste portion of the meal will precipitate out by a process of shittotropism.

[A White Bear]

This would only be handy in situations in which having shit around later would be significantly worse than having it right on the table, during the meal.

[ben wolfson]

Not at all! Suppose that the shit is separable from the food prior to cooking. (Whether this is so or not requires investigation, obviously.) In that case, the shit and food could be separated immediately at harvest, and the farmer would have fertilizer right there! Meanwhile, groceries would be less massive, so trips to the store would be less burdensome, and shelf space would be freed for a greater variety of products!

[A White Bear]

Just like you can't get the honey without the bee, you can't get the shit without the spit. Our wonderful digestive acids make it happen! So unless you plan on shipping some of that humany goodness to the farm, I don't think it's possible. Sorry to be a negative nelly.

[ben wolfson]

Our wonderful digestive acids make it happen!

Ex hypothesi we are doing this without digestion. It sounds as if you're raising doubts about the very feasibility of the process for which the post pines, about its utility should it prove feasible.

[ben wolfson]

Nevertheless, it's true; I wouldn't want to live in a world without zinc.

[Standpipe Bridgeplate]

What do bees have to do with honey?

[ben wolfson]

Fuzzy yellow bumble bees are filled with honey on the inside. It takes upwards of 200 bees to get enough honey to fill one of those honey bear things, and each bee must be cracked verrrrry carefully lest anything but its honey get into the mixture. At least, that's the way artisanal honey makers do it. Most of your massed-produced honey is made by just mashing bees up indiscriminately, and later forcing the bee-y goo through successively finer filters.

[Standpipe Bridgeplate]

Surely honey-containment is a natural and necessary property of bears? Why else would we take such pains to store the extracted honey in bear-shaped containers? Bees make wax, and other bees.

[Standpipe Bridgeplate]

Have you tried keeping honey in anything else? Can't be done. It's absurd, like splitting the atom.

[ben wolfson]

You have, my friend, fallen into a grave albeit understandable error. Just as bees themselves are generated from the corpse of a bullock or calf, suitably contained for a period of time, so too are bears themselves made out of, and grow by the ingestion of, honey (the bee-material they excrete—to bring this discussion full circle, in the case of bears the postulated separation is possible, and if, once one has created a bear out of honey in the accepted fashion, one fed it honey alone, it would produce no waste). But it is bees which are filled with honey. You are correct that bees make wax.

Honey is kept in model bears as a magical warding-off of real bears. The fleshly bears will see the untransmuted Bärstoff and treat it as if it were a bear itself, and avoid trespassing on its territory.

[A White Bear]

I vouch. Them things is fuckin scary.

[ben wolfson]

How rude of Standpipe and me to talk of bears so glibly while in one's presence.

My apologies.

[A White Bear]

Hippies are always putting honey in non-bear shapes, like jars or squeezebottles. The Zapatistas, Golden Blossom, and Grindstone Farm all make bear-shape-free honey. Thank God for hippies!

[ben wolfson]

I was going to point out that honey itself isn't bear-shaped or not, but rather assumes the shape of its container, but then I remembered that, like glass, honey is not a liquid, but rather an extremely ductile solid.

[Standpipe Bridgeplate]

So said Mr. Wizard, among others. But Mr. Wizard also stood children on their heads and fed them apple slices. He was, to be sure, an up-through-children-moving snack fetishist. Everything he said was therefore false.

[Standpipe Bridgeplate]

Let's stipulate that modifiers associate to the left.

[Phutatorius' Chestnut]

I think the arbitrary distinctions between highly viscous liquids and amorphous solids is endemic of the material scientists' glass-centric bitumen-o-phobic world view.

[Adam Kotsko]

Ben Wolfson is a true biologian.

[Standpipe Bridgeplate]

In the grand old tradition of Professor Sedgwick (PDF):

The Sedgwick lectureship is the only one of its kind at the Institute. It was founded after the death of Professor Sedgwick four years ago [1921] by his friends and former pupils as a result of the admiration which the famous biologian had inspired in those who were fortunate enough to know him.

[text]

It being stipulated (under good counsel) that bees are filled with honey, and bears are made of honey, and yet that hippies do not put honey in pastic bears, is not the proper direction of inquiry the composition of hippies? And is that composition not, for certain, composition, that is, poo?

For it is well documented that like attracts like, and therefore, one's wasteproduct, suspended in liquid food, draws out the wasteproduct from the food, provided that the liquified food goo and the poo and the cheesecloth are in proper proportion to each other and to the various beakers and containers.

But what is left over, when the poo has attracted poo; what remains from the liquid food? Of course, it is honey.

For is it not true that, upon ingesting only honey for a day, one will not require usage of the stinky pot? It is true, and has been known for all the ages and what's more for several ages hence.

Is it not true that bees, who are filled with honey, do not create wasteproduct, whereas bears, who are merely made of honey, do? It is. And that is because, being made of honey, bears must eat food, such as fishies and documentarians, the food containing waste and not being pure honey. In order to convert the food to honey, the bears must need separate the poo from the honey, and in so doing, they produce large, nutty things.

And yet, it is also so that bears are uncommonly fond of honey. This falls also under the ageless maxim that like attracts like. And it reduces the need for the bear to excrete. Bears, being lazy animals, always welcome reduction of need.

But the hippy does not put its honey in a bear shaped container! And for what purpose? To obscure the very fact that it is honey, of course! For, being made of feces, the hippy will perforce excrete, even when eating only honey, which otherwise negates said need. So as the bee, who is filled with honey, need not excrete no matter what it ingests, the hippy, being formed from excrement, must needs excrete even if it eats only honey! Hippies are sensitive to this fact, and wish to disguise when they eat honey so as to sheild their true natures. And, perforce, hippies eat uncommon large amounts of honey, it being that they excrete less, though they must needs still excrete, when eating honey. And it explains the smell.

[text]

Hopefully my analysis has gotten us part of the way towards solving the larger delimma: separating the hippy from the honey at the time of the harvest.

It would seem that merely instilling wasteproduct into the ground would do, for the waste in the wheat must needs be drawn the waste in the soil while it is interred. But this is not so, for obvious reasons. The wastproduct, while interred, becomes weasels, chipmunks, and other varmints.

Another approach would be to get hippies directly involved in the harvest but so far they have not been cooperative.

[text]

finally, the theory that hippies are composed of excrement is well supported by the following thought experiment:

a thing which is made of excrement must necessarily excrete. That is, such a thing would excrete irregardless of what foostuffs it ate. Therefore it must needs eat more foostuffs to make up for the loss.

And so, a thing made of excrement must needs eat more foodstuffs than an average thing, not made of excrement.

Closing the thought experiment, hippies eat lots of food, due to a phenomenon called "munchies" and yet do not get very fat, for the most part.

Hippies are made of poo.

[ben wolfson]

a thing which is made of excrement must necessarily excrete.

This is like saying that the form of the tall is tall. Won't fly.

[Standpipe Bridgeplate]

Oh, Ben, what's a category error among friends?

I'm beginning to question this whole enterprise. At first it was because I thought we were just reinscribing shit-negative norms. But what is a norm, anyway? A condition on the very shape of honey: a bear. To underline this connection, let us call them "borms".

My real qualm with borms goes deeper. I like food, a lot. Food, you might say, is the shit. To propose separating the two—could there be an ontologicaller crisis?