Althouse: "You could go from vegetarianism to cannibalism in one fell swoop."

June 10, 2022

"You could go from vegetarianism to cannibalism in one fell swoop."

I wrote, here.

24 comments:

David Begley said...: One of your best lines, Ann!

It deserved its own post.; 6/10/22, 7:10 AM
RideSpaceMountain said...: David the Good at thesurvivalgardener.com said it best, first:

"Compost Your Enemies!"

It makes a great t-shirt.; 6/10/22, 7:11 AM
Misinforminimalism said...: We compost a lot. We have a very good compost setup. And one thing that always happens is there's a little bit of something that didn't quite compost fully (eggshell, seed casing, whatever). So spreading composted human remains in my veg patch is not a chance I'm willing to take.; 6/10/22, 7:16 AM
gilbar said...: IF you Truly Loved your Loved Ones.. Couldn't you just Eat Them Right Up?; 6/10/22, 7:19 AM
Ann Althouse said...: What about planting some new trees, with the compost deep in the hole?

But what about a flower garden? How would you feel about cutting beautiful roses grown in human compost and putting them in a vase inside the house? Would you feel differently if the vase was in the middle of the table where you eat dinner?; 6/10/22, 7:30 AM
Ann Althouse said...: They buried Barbara in the old church yard
They buried Sweet William beside her
Out of his grave grew a red, red rose
And out of hers a briar; 6/10/22, 7:32 AM
Ann Althouse said...: @Misinforminimalism

So it's the fear of the stray fingernail?; 6/10/22, 7:33 AM
Lloyd W. Robertson said...: In my work on Gulliver's Travels, I discovered the scientific experiment to recycle excrement as food. A major part of the Projectors' work is an attempt to make agriculture both easier and more efficient--less hard labor, more leisure for the masses, more food. It's not working so far. Good old Isaac Asimov, who produced a great annotated edition of the Travels, says that of course "night soil" has often been used as fertilizer, and this shit to food thing will be necessary if we are going to take space travel seriously. I looked things up, and there are 96 bags of shit on the moon, left there by the Apollo XI crew. NASA is working on recycling all human waste for the ISS.

So the question would be: why not cannibalism? Let us say for efficiency? This came up when the British expanded their expeditions around the world's oceans in those pathetic little wooden ships. A precursor of space travel. Lots of losses at sea, and if there were a few survivors, it was almost automatic that they had survived by means of cannibalism. Such events were barely noted in any documents until the 1800s, and then the good old Victorians tried to enforce a law against cannibalism. Swift of course brings up cannibalism in "A Modest Proposal," and there are hints of it elsewhere.; 6/10/22, 7:46 AM
farmgirl said...: Is nothing sacred?

There are such places as green cemeteries, where people are buried at a certain depth in a plain wooden casket. I like that idea.

https://www.greenburialvermont.org/

https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20160815_ad-resurgendum-cum-christo_en.html

Factory farms compost their dead cattle. Slaughter houses compost entrails, etc.
it’s not cool to separate ourselves from the ancient stories. Or peoples. We are not animals.; 6/10/22, 7:48 AM
Rusty said...: I wonder what diseases a corpse carries that would be transferrable to the vegetation? I know the City of Chicago had a program where you could go to one of their sewage treatment plants and get processed "sludge" in its dried form. They went through great pains to warn people that it was NOT intended for vegetables.
I'm told the clean water from a sewage treatment plant is tested for ecoli, but not for medications. There are a lot of fertility meds in waste water.; 6/10/22, 8:28 AM
Howard said...: Why's this post conjuring up images of Charleston Heston and Edward G Robinson?

It doesn't make sense to compost the cow when the glue factory pays cash to turn it into dog food. The European Union restricted meat and bone meal for feed so they have done a ton of testing MBM as fertilizer. It pretty weak and labor intensive compared to urea and ammonia.

When I was developing a certified organic fertilizer from rendering plant waste, I ran the numbers. If all of the rendered meat was digested instead, the resulting ammonia was enough to feed 100% of the nitrogen demands of conventional agriculture. This would make all food cost as much as organic, so it's a tough sell.

These vegetable composters wanting to make fertilizer are competing with renderers for supermarket meat waste because of the nitrogen debt of plants.; 6/10/22, 8:35 AM
mikee said...: Rusty, the same sewage compost is sold here in Austin, Texas, as "Dillo Dirt" for use in non-vegetable gardens or yards. And it is pretty pricey, considering that it is made simply by draining a concrete sludge pond at the sewage plant, and letting the Texas weather dry the stuff that sank to the bottom. Bagging and shipping it is the only real expense.

I stick with cow manure compost, myself, as long ago I learned from a Clint Eastwood movie that if one walks a straight line through the pasture of life, one is bound to step in a few cow pies.; 6/10/22, 9:01 AM
MOfarmer said...: you should have a tag for "one fell swoop" luv that phrase.; 6/10/22, 9:07 AM
Joe Smith said...: '@Misinforminimalism'

Cannibalarianism?

Supercalifragilistic...; 6/10/22, 9:18 AM
Lurker21 said...: MACDUFF: [on hearing that his family and servants have all been killed]

All my pretty ones?
Did you say all? O hell-kite! All?
What, all my pretty chickens and their dam
At one fell swoop?

Remember reading Shakespeare and thinking that if it wasn't incomprehensible gobbledy-gook it was all clichés, not realizing that he invented those clichés?

But why wasn't it "O hell-kite!" that passed into common usage?; 6/10/22, 9:52 AM
Rollo said...: Remember the dramatic moment when Charlton Heston screams "Soylent Green is human composting!"; 6/10/22, 9:55 AM
Eleanor said...: I read somewhere people are only nine missed meals from being willing to commit a crime to get something to eat. Maybe if we all get hungry enough, some of these ideas will become palatable to us.; 6/10/22, 10:00 AM
lonejustice said...: Joan Baez -- "Barbara Allen"

What a beautiful and sad song, and a fantastic video.

It's been decades since I heard Joan sing this ballad.

Thanks for posting.; 6/10/22, 10:28 AM
farmgirl said...: “It doesn't make sense to compost the cow when the glue factory pays cash to turn it into dog food.”

There used to be a rendering company out of Ellenburg NY. Hasn’t been one for years. They used to pay decently for downers/dead cows. Then charged us. Then went out of business.; 6/10/22, 12:31 PM
Tina848 said...: The grass is always greener over the septic tank....Was not just a book, but the truth.; 6/10/22, 1:02 PM
n.n said...: From humane rights to clinical cannibalism. Planned under a forward-looking pretense.; 6/10/22, 1:46 PM
Howard said...: It's hard for Mom and Pop renderers to compete within a highly consolidated commodity industry making pennies on the dollar. Managing the stink with encroaching suburbia is a killer; 6/10/22, 2:46 PM
Howard said...: The grass is greener over the leach lines; 6/10/22, 2:47 PM
Marc in Eugene said...: There are an awful great lot of hell- compounds a few of which I don't recall ever seeing. Hell-rook (GM Hopkins), hell-pot, hell-moth, hell-spurge (DG Rossetti), hell-roaring (The Oregonian 1993), hell-cart ("a cart or carriage, esp. a hackney carriage") and so on.

farmgirl, Yours in probably the first cite of Ad resurgendum cum Christo this decade although there was that woman in LA (just the other day?) who won a lawsuit against the county because they cremated her son. I'm vaguely surprised that the reigning Pope authorised its publication (although he did eventually send Cardinal Mueller into the outer darkness).; 6/10/22, 5:20 PM