Sunday, February 15, 2009

All About Dung

I had the pleasure of accidentally watching a show on the History channel called "All About Dung". As you may already know, my family has this strange fascination for dung to a point that we talk about it freely during meals, much to KS' consternation.

Anyway, this show revealed many fascinating facts about dung. Did you know that it can be made into gunpowder? Unfortunately, they didn't explain how to do this so I can't divulge the secrets of literally bombing someone with your stool.

Another interesting fact was that there are some food made out of animal dung. There's the most expensive coffee in the world, called kopi luwak, which are undigested coffee beans excreted from a civet cat.

Picture taken from here.
This is found in Indonesia. The locals used to collect and sell the to the Dutch when they occupied Indonesia about a hundred years ago. Ingenius way of making a living, I must say.

Then, there's Argan oil, a type of oil used for salads, dipping bread, heck, even in cosmetics. It comes from goats who climb the argan tree and eat the argan nut.
Picture taken from here.
Again, these argan nuts pass through the goat's digestive system and tadah! Extract the oil from these nuts and you get, Argan oil.

Other interesting stuff was how the term "Being dumped on" and "Sitting on the Throne" (from a king who used to crap on his throne-like toilet while dishing out advise to his kingdom) came about and the Roman culture of communal dumps. They'd actually share a stick with a bit of cloth on one end to wipe themselves, you know, there, after pooping. Passing around the stick can be tricky and that's where you get the term, "Getting the wrong side of the stick" came from.

And finally, there's cow dung which is used in India to lengthen the life of batteries, dried cow dung used as fire elements to cook... Gosh, can't wait to properly watch the whole show again on TV.

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