Interesting Movie, Interesting Book

My parents are right-winged... extremely so. I imagine if they read this post, they'd be mortified. (As it is, my Dad said his feelings are hurt because I didn't buy him the Sarah Palin book for Christmas.)

Last night I watched "Food, Inc." I've been pretty interested in seeing it for a while. I ran across a blog talking about it while I was killing time*. So, I checked to see if I could put it in our delivered movie queue, when, lo and behold, I was able to watch it online right then. Woohoo! My hubby (who is incredibly indulgent about my fruity tendencies) watched with me.

If you decide to watch it, I'd suggest going into it with an open but critically objective mind. It's not a watch and go on with life documentary. You have to be ready to evaluate how you're going to let it affect your life. Anyway, that's my take on it (and, actually, most documentaries).

I liked it, and so did my husband. We are making changes to the food we purchase and eat (I'll post about my new honey another time). We are also lucky enough to be well enough off to afford those kinds of changes. Of course, if you read this from Consumption Rebellion, changing your food purchasing habits doesn't have to break the bank. (Luckily for me, she just posted about this.)


As for the book... what do you think of the title "The Humanure Handbook"? When I told my husband the title of this next book in my reading queue, he looked at me and said, "Please tell me that doesn't mean what I think it means."

It does... kind of. It's a book that explores how nature dealt with our excretions pre-sewage system, the enormous water and pollution damage the current system has created, and a fairly simple process for safely composting humanure so that it is nearly pathogen free. Just as an aside, the water treatment methods explained in the book (as in what our cities use today) sounds a lot like meat (specifically meat pathogen) treatment described in "Food, Inc."

You want to know something awesome? The guy who wrote the book published it himself because no publishing company would touch it, and then he made it available to download FREE on his website. Is that not so totally cool? That's when you know someone really cares about the message that they're putting out. He also includes basic instructions on how to make/find everything you'd need for this. (Just to state it: the author makes some decidedly atheist comments; doesn't mean I can't glean something from the other 250 pages.)

Does this mean I get to humanure? (sigh) Somehow I doubt it's going to happen at this point. Besides my hubby's reaction there's also the fact that we're renting and I just don't think we're allowed to uninstall a toilet. I don't know where we'd put a humanure friendly toilet! I'm just going to be happy that we're changing out incoming, and work on changing the outgoing later.


*killing time - isn't that such a sad figure of speech? When you actually consider the imagery behind it... it makes me never want to kill time again. Though I'm not sure what exactly writing my posts would be... therapy, I guess.