Do plants shit? Does a geranium have to go every once in a while? They’re suspiciously quiet, the plants on your window sill, as if they were actually doing something. But they don’t shit. That’s what makes them so popular as housemates. Just imagine having to take your begonias and African violets out for a walk along with your dog. Out of the question. Throughout their lives, plants retain all the excrement they produce in vesicles or crystals. These little rubbish bags are what give spiced food its pungent flavour. You season your food with plant shit.
So you don’t have to walk a plant, but you do have to give it water. In a natural setting plants get water automatically from the clouds. But there are no clouds indoors; for a house plant, a living room is as barren as a desert. So plants have no business being in your house. If you still want a couple on your windowsill you’ll have to provide the rain yourself, locally, with a watering can. This is not an insurmountable problem. We’re only too happy to give drink to the thirsty; it’s a real work of mercy, and it’s much less laborious than feeding the hungry, visiting the sick or burying the dead. But it doesn’t help much. The next day the plants are dry again. What did they do with their water? If they had drunk it all up your African violet would be an African bush after a week and an African tree after a year. In actual fact, your plants look at you reproachfully from their dry saucers after just one day, manipulating your guilt feelings by hanging there limply, pure blackmail, with yellow leaves in reserve as a last weapon.
Do plants pee? No; full saucers dry up, but empty saucers never fill by themselves. A plant has no willie, no kidneys, no bladder. Plants don’t pee, they sweat. They do it all over their bodies but especially from their leaves, through millions of openings, the stomata. The evaporation of all those drops of sweat provides the power to draw the water up out of the roots. Plants don’t have to get rid of water by peeing; they drink water in order to sweat. They drink with their roots, using the water they absorb to pump up their cells like the air in bicycle tyres. If there’s a water shortage the cells slacken and the leaves hang limp.
Humans pee. Boy, do they ever! A litre and a half a day is only the average. That’s more than enough to step away from the subject of shit for a moment. The urine reservoir, the bladder, fills up several times a day and has to be drained. Whatever goes in by drinking has to come out by peeing. Yet something isn’t quite right. A person drinks an average of three litres a day. That’s twice as much as they pee out. A litre and a half has gone missing. And even more than that. If you count the liquid in your food that’s half a litre more, and a quarter of a litre is released when you digest your food. Where does all that water go? There’s only one explanation: you’re leaky. As leaky as a plant.
So where’s the leak? To find the leak in a bicycle tyre you immerse it in a bucket of water; for a leak in a human being you place the human in front of a hot stove and water will come out drop by drop. The person is sweating, just like a plant: out of lots of little holes. A human has two million sweat glands. That’s more than most animals have. Cats, for instance, sweat only on the soles of their paws; if you look closely you can see the damp tracks where they’ve walked across the piano.
Humans don’t sweat to pump up water, the way plants do. They have hearts to do that; the heart maintains a stream of red water to take care of internal logistics. Humans sweat to cool off. Other mammals have little use for such a cooling system because of their fur, which interferes with evaporation. But for naked apes in sunny Africa it was a godsend. By sweating they were able to endure the heat longer than their prey—as long as there was enough water on hand to replenish their reserves. In the tropics you need as much as ten litres of water a day, and in many places in Africa it’s just not available. That’s why Africans are so lazy—in the eyes of many old colonialists. A black person would rather doze against a palm tree, they think, than climb up to pick bananas and open a fruit and vegetable stand. What you need are white or yellow people, the ones who built the big cities and civilisations, from Babylon to Beijing and from Rome to Amsterdam. But white and yellow people come from cool lands, and black people come from the tropics. In the tropics you can easily become overheated. The best remedy is not to work too hard. Just lie there until the bananas fall of their own accord. If the colonialists had bothered to roll up their sleeves and get cracking, they would have discovered this for themselves. But they had one advantage: they had salt. Natural salt was scarce in the middle of Africa, far from the sea, and it was difficult to replace the salt you lost through sweating. There was salt to be had elsewhere, but no potable water. Salt had been found in the desert, but the people who found it let others do all the work. Camels. Camels transport the water from oasis to oasis—outside and inside. A camel can drink 100 litres of water at a time. Where do they put it all? Not in a stomach; that’s too small. And not in a hump; that’s full of fat. If a hump shrinks after a long journey, the camel restores it by eating, not by drinking. The water it drinks disappears into the tangle of its intestines, from which it’s distributed throughout its entire body (now suddenly 100 kilograms heavier). But a camel is leaky, too. When it does a heavy job of work, it can lose ten litres of sweat a day. To protect its water supply, it pees only one scant litre from its enormous body, and even its dung is on the dry side. This enables the camel to stick it out for more than a week, working hard and without drinking.
Excess water that isn’t lost through sweating or breathing has to be peed out. For an intriguing experience, try peeing and drinking a jug of water at the same time. It takes surprisingly little imagination to feel as if the water you had poured in at the top had run right out again at the bottom, something like the vague tingling sensation you get in your head when something goes in one ear and comes out the other. That’s the work of your brain. If it sees two things happening at the same time, it assumes that a causal relationship exists between them. This is called understanding. But it doesn’t always correspond with the facts. The water you drink now doesn’t reappear when you pee until much later, which is a good thing. Your body needs time to extract useful substances from your drinks: alcohol if you want to be cheerful, vitamins if you want to be healthy. This happens mainly in the gastrointestinal tract, which also loses water with every turd you produce, but not much. Unlike peeing, pooing is responsible for keeping water in; most of the water you drink goes into your body via the large intestine and the blood. While shit has never really been in your body at all, urine has been to every nook and cranny. Water and blood together travel to the kidneys. These are two bean-shaped filters, as big as a hand, on either side of the spinal column. Here 99 per cent of all the incoming blood is purified and put back into circulation. Of all the water that flows through your kidneys, you only pee out 1 per cent. The exact amount is not regulated by the volume of water but by the salt content.
The main purpose of peeing is to maintain the salinity of your blood. The water level then takes care of itself, since salt retains water. A spilled heap of salt on the kitchen table spontaneously absorbs moisture from the air—that’s how much it wants to be dissolved in water. You lug around fifty litres of water in your body—five bucketfuls—and you need half a kilogram of salt to retain it. Your blood is an inland sea of salt water, a legacy from the time when our distant ancestors were sea-dwellers. But our blood isn’t as salty as the sea. With nine grams per litre instead of thirty-five, blood is only a quarter as salty. The water in your inland sea is brackish. If it gets too sweet you have to eat more salt or pass water until the salt content returns to nine grams per litre. If that doesn’t happen, your body cells (which are brackish, too) will absorb so much water that they literally burst. This rarely happens in the Western world, with its vast assortment of salty food. We are more likely to suffer from an overdose of salt. To get rid of it, our kidneys have to work overtime or we have to flush them with additional fresh water. You get thirsty. So drink a lot and pee a lot, as long as the potable water is fresh. Otherwise you die of thirst, like a shipwrecked sailor in the middle of the ocean. Even though he bobs around on his raft in a million cubic kilometres of water, he’ll die of thirst in the end. If he doesn’t drink he’ll die; if he drinks seawater he’ll die, too. For the kidneys to pee out all the salt in one litre of seawater they need two litres of fresh. Seawater just gives the kidneys more salt to process, and the body cells are soon as pickled as the cells in a salted herring. The full-strength seawater draws the water out of the brackish cells, which shrivel up and fall apart.
Urinating is not meant to get the water out of your body. If that were true, you might just as well drink less water. That makes sense for a land animal, since potable water is scarce on dry land. Water in your body serves as a means of transportation for substances you have to get rid of. Your urinary passages are your own personal sewer, and a sewer doesn’t work without water. Besides salt, water also drains off the products of metabolic decomposition. Carbohydrates and fats present few problems during combustion. They consist mainly of carbon, oxygen and hydrogen, which can be burned to form water and carbon dioxide. Just like plants, we can exhale them without giving anyone offence. If we were to live from carbohydrates and fats alone we wouldn’t need the LADIES and GENTS anymore; the range of our cars would ultimately be determined by their own tank capacity and not by the capacity of our bladders. Unfortunately we eat the wrong things. There’s too much protein in our food. Protein contains nitrogen, and nitrogen isn’t as easy as oxygen, carbon, and hydrogen to process into something harmless. The simplest possibility, ammonia (NH3), is highly toxic. If you’re a marine animal you can rid yourself of nitrogen in the vast oceans of the world, but on land you have little other choice than to firmly incorporate nitrogen into the more complex urea (CO(NH2)2, which has to be peed out with lots of water. Urea constitutes half of all the dissolved substances present in urine; the other half consists of more than a hundred chemicals.
Urine is yellow. It’s usually light yellow, but the more concentrated it is the darker it gets. Vitamin B2 makes the yellow nice and bright. If you’d like something other than yellow, you can colour your urine by adding rhubarb or senna (brown to pink), beets (red) or blackberries to your food. You can give it a pleasant odour by inhaling turpentine, which makes your urine smell like violets or roses. Fashionable ladies in ancient Rome did this with abandon, although it isn’t healthy. Better to eat asparagus, valerian or leeks, each of which gives urine its own pronounced aroma. But you can also do nothing at all. On its own, fresh urine has a delightful beef bouillon smell, especially if you condense it. The salty taste closely corresponds to that of bouillon, although it’s too bitter for most people.
Urine, with all the substances it contains, is supersaturated, so it easily precipitates to form grit or stones. As long as these things are in the kidneys you don’t notice them very much, but as they move towards the exit they naturally run into obstacles and get stuck as kidney stones, renal pelvis stones, ureter stones or bladder stones, which can be very painful. As people eat more meat and become less active they’re more likely to develop such stones. In the Netherlands the count so far is five (women) to eight (men) out of 10,000 individuals. Fortunately the range of treatment possibilities is steadily increasing. With a lithotripter, many stones can be rendered harmless externally.
Almost all the dissolved substances disappear into the sewer with our urine, which is a shame. That’s a loss of precious materials. Many Westerners take multivitamin pills every morning, which means that the Dutch, the Americans and the Germans have the most expensive urine in the world; very little of the vitamin content they take is actually absorbed into the body. Water purifiers complain about the high proportion of medicines in their sewer water, which ends up treating entire population groups without a doctor’s prescription, after purification. Oral contraceptives interfere with the reproduction of frogs via the sewer. Conservationists fear the worst for the survival of marine animals.
Instead of whining about it, environmental experts would do well to take an example from our forefathers, who saw their urine for what it is: a rich source of chemicals. The Romans used it for washing. The ammonia that was released from the urine after a few days of rotting combined with the grease from the laundry to form a liquid soap. Laundry and urine were collected by the same group of workers. From every corner of the cities of Rome, these fullones (fullers) picked up the urine from the local residents in large amphorae to be used in the laundries, which were understandably located very far away. The dirty togas and stolas were placed in stone troughs and soaked in urine, then trampled like grapes. Finally the urine was rinsed out in a stream or river and the laundry could be bleached with sulphur on a sunny field. Filthy as it was, the work was well paid. Emperor Titus Flavius Vespasian (69–79) became aware of this and levied a high tax on it. When the fullers complained to the emperor and referred to their malodorous working conditions, the emperor uttered the immortal words ‘pecunia non olet’—money doesn’t stink. Urine was also used in the dying of textiles. The ammonia made the leaf- or root-based pigments water soluble so they could be absorbed by the textile fibres. Once they had been saturated with the dye, the lengths of cloth were hung in the fresh air. There the oxygen reversed the chemical process and the pigments became insoluble once again. Otherwise the fabric would fade in the first washing. Urine was also indispensable in the fulling of wool, until the emergence of the chemical industry. The ammonia in the urine caused the wool to become matted, which thickened the cloth.
Urine was famous for its healing powers even before it became laden with vitamins and other medicines. And urine therapy still has its adherents. Every morning they drink a glass of their own water. Christians feel encouraged in this by the biblical injunction ‘Drink waters out of thine own cistern, and running waters out of thine own well.’ Hindus have traditionally regarded their urine as shivambu, ‘the water of Shiva’. Among the modern practitioners of urine therapy were Mahatma Gandhi, John Lennon, Jim Morrison and the Indian prime minister Moraji Desai. It can’t do you much harm: the worst that can happen from drinking your own urine is getting your own illnesses, and you’ve already had them. There’s no bacteria in urine fresh from the ureter. But for centuries the use of urine as a diagnostic tool was even more widespread than its use as a medicine. If you got sick during the Middle Ages, you’d fill a bottle with urine first thing in the morning and carry it in a wicker basket to the uroscopist. He would hold the uroscopy flask up to the sun, study the colour, smell it, taste it, stir the sediment and listen to the bubbles before pronouncing his diagnosis. Sometimes he was right. If you had diabetes, for example, he could always taste it because the urine would be sweet; otherwise it wasn’t. The ancient Greeks had an even simpler method. They poured the pee over a stone and waited until it dried. If it attracted bees, you had diabetes. There are still doctors today who simply stick a finger in the suspicious urine and lick it. But most of them now use a dipstick, by which they can determine the proportion of acid, protein and blood. Amino acids like leucine and tyrosine indicate liver disease. Bacteria are cultivated in order to detect an infection. Highly refined analytical techniques have been established to trace the remains of drugs in the urine of athletes or to narrow down the use of narcotics to weeks after the last use. Doctors haven’t been this confident since the days of humoralism. Back then, health was a question of balance among the four bodily fluids: blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. The best way to determine this balance was by examining the colour of the urine. If it was too yellow, that meant there was too much yellow bile, and the patient’s temperament would be choleric; black urine indicated malaria (blackwater fever); and red urine was due to an excess of blood. So you knew what you had. Then all you had to do was cure it.
The inability to urinate is very serious. In its extreme form it can kill you, in its mild form it can be very uncomfortable, even if for no other reason than missing the relief you get from taking a good piss. There’s little that can beat the delight afforded by a good hearty stream aimed against a tree, the liberating spatter in the toilet, the catharsis that comes after the thigh-squeezing anxiety of waiting your turn. No one has expressed this better than the French writer Alphonse Allais, whose newspaper columns, written well over a century ago, were extremely popular. In order to distance himself from his subject he used his fantasy, a quality of which he was not in short supply (take his discovery of the frosted glass aquarium for shy fish, for example). During one particular pub crawl, Allais found himself peeing against a wall with some friends. Blissful with pleasure, he fastened up his trousers and sighed, ‘Ah, my friends, if only I were rich. If I were rich I’d never stop pissing!’
Peeing is infectious and creates a sense of warm intimacy, even between different species.
Contributing to Allais’s pleasure to a not-insignificant degree was companionship. Men learn this as boys engaging in pissing contests, the only sport at which I excelled. As a kid I toppled empty tin cans from more than a metre away with youthful exuberance. It’s been a long time since I’ve been able to manage that, now that this mechanism, too, has slackened. Like all the other muscles, the bladder also decreases in strength with the advancement of years; a few long and hearty sessions in the loo are replaced by lots of feeble ones. The bladder muscles enclose a cavity in which the urine from the kidneys is collected until it’s time to urinate. As the bladder fills, the pressure increases. Sensory fibres in the wall give the nervous system the first sign when the urine level reaches 0.25 litres. The autonomic nervous system opens the locks—if you’re toilet-trained, that is. Toilet-trained people exercise a certain amount of control from the brain on the autonomic goings-on lower down, but when the pressure exceeds 0.1 atmospheres there’s no stopping the tide. If you’re asleep, you can only hope your bladder wakes you in time. During the day, the urge is mainly hastened by like-minded company. If someone next to you is urinating, you’ll have to pee yourself, as if your willie had ears. Sometimes it takes a bit longer for the stream to get going—out of embarrassment, probably—but once it does, you splash along happily with the rest. But you don’t really need another person. A leaking tap is enough to rouse you out of bed. It’s irresistible. The autonomic nervous system won’t let itself be bullied by the central authority. It has a lot in common with the Pavlov reflex. If a dog is used to being given food when it hears a bell ring, it’ll start drooling whenever it hears the bell, even without food. If splashing goes with urination, the autonomic nervous system says to itself, then urinating goes with splashing. Consequently, you can help children with urination problems by playing a tape of splashing sounds. But give the child headphones or you’ll end up having to pee yourself. In laboratories for urine research in which mice are used they have an even simpler method for getting the urine flowing: bare mouse feet on a cold floor. Cold feet make the bladder muscles contract, even in humans, so suddenly you have to go, even if your bladder is almost empty.
Not everyone is toilet-trained, not by a long shot. In the Netherlands alone, one million people cannot properly hold their urine. Half these people are elderly, with disorders of which incontinence is only a symptom. The other half are babies and toddlers whose autonomic nervous systems are not yet under control. But there’s also a category between these two, people who wet themselves while having a good laugh, when the muscles seem to have a mind of their own. For theatre directors, cabaret performances are particularly notorious for the wet spots on the chair seats.
Town and parish councils are also strictly opposed to having their property pissed on. The acid in the urine makes ancient stones crumble. But peeing in public, especially in the company of your mates after a long night of loud carousing at the pub, can be a source of special pleasure. A toddler couldn’t wish for a more glorious way to let off steam, although sometimes there’s a heavy price to pay. Drunks who urinate in the canals of Amsterdam in order to spare the city’s monumental buildings can fall in the water and drown, especially at night when the townspeople are off the streets. Police officers who dredge up the bodies have little difficulty determining the cause of death: the guy’s fly is wide open. Serves them right, say many of Amsterdam’s burghers. They shouldn’t do such filthy things.
Is piss dirtier than shit? It’s a question of taste. But in addition to liquid and solid there’s a third state, at least as offensive, by which filth can escape: gas. It’s much more difficult to seal the body off from gas. You may piss like a bull and shit like a dredging machine, but you get rid of most of your waste in the form of gas. You defecate once a day and urinate maybe ten times, but you exhale at least 17,500 times, your whole life long—and once you’ve breathed your last, you’re a goner. When you think of breathing, you think mainly of the oxygen that comes in, but after every inhalation you also exhale to remove the used gases. Unlike faeces and urine, your gas is brought in and carried away through one and the same opening. It’s a distasteful thought, certainly when you realise that part of the waste gas you’ve just eliminated will be unavoidably inhaled in your very next breath (unless you run very fast perhaps). But the reality is even worse: every breath you take has already been in someone else’s mouth—in the mouth of your friend or that of your enemy, in the mouth of a dental assistant or in the dental catastrophe of dirty old men who chew tobacco. Milk is pasteurised by law, but who’s doing anything about our air? If you really want fresh air in your bedroom, shut the window, don’t open it.
If all is well, the amount of gas going out of your body is equal to the amount coming in. Otherwise you run the risk of bursting, or deflating, like a balloon. Yet not every breath is successful. At some point, in either Creation or during the course of evolution, a design fault occurred. The next time you get up in the morning, look into the mirror and say ‘ahh’ so you can see into your throat. That’s where your windpipe intersects with your food pipe. A life-threatening situation. It was different with our forefathers the fish. The gases from the water went directly into the blood and out again by way of the gills, as they do in fish today, without the risk of taking a wrong turn. Our lungs developed as a protrusion of our intestines, which is why air and food pass each other in the mouth and have to travel through the same throat. Consequently, with every bite you take there’s a danger of food ending up in your lungs, or—even worse—air in your stomach; just try getting rid of that during a formal dinner. What the throat most resembles is a railway crossing that lets the food pass through first, and then the air. The crossing is guarded by the epiglottis, which switches back and forth between hunger and shortness of breath like an insane crossing gate. It’s hard for people who believe in Creation to accept the fact that their almighty God turned out such shoddy work. They see their Creator as a great watchmaker who fashioned all the gears in our body to mesh perfectly. I’m certainly willing to go along with that idea, except in the morning when I’m standing in front of the mirror and saying ‘ahh’. Then I think: He may be a great watchmaker, but my throat could definitely use a great plumber.
You can hear it when air ends up in the intestinal tract. It’s like a badly maintained central heating system. In both cases the sputtering is caused by air bubbles suspended in liquid. You can hear the grumbling right through your stomach, even though it’s actually taking place further on, in your intestines. The remedy is obvious: bleed the radiator. But where’s the closest valve, and where’s the bleed key? In your stomach. The air here can escape the same way it came in: out of the mouth via the oesophagus and the throat to join the fresh air outside. This is called burping (officially it’s borborygmus—the most wonderful onomatopoeia I know). Babies are good at it. When they suck on the nipple they accidentally take in a lot of air that has to be expelled from the stomach. But adults also swallow more air than they can handle while they’re eating, especially if they talk too much at the same time, eat too fast, play with their false teeth, or if they’re nervous. They burp a lot of the air back up, like a baby, but you can’t deliberately burp it away. To make yourself burp, you first have to swallow air to get the process going, and usually more goes in than comes out.
Once the air has passed through the stomach there’s no turning back. The next valve doesn’t come along until the end of the tunnel, at the anus. If it hurries, the swallowed air will get there within ten minutes, so the air from your lunch will arrive at the same time as the bread from your breakfast. How do you get rid of it? While there are facilities for defecating and urinating that you can properly retreat to, there are no toilets or urinals for the evacuation of intestinal gas. A fart isn’t very different from a turd with the shit scraped off, but that doesn’t make it any less of a nuisance. All you can do is hold your fart until a suitable moment comes along. But the pressure can mount quickly. A human being has to get rid of 0.75 to 1.5 litres of intestinal gas a day on average—enough to blow up a party balloon halfway. That’s too much gas for a healthy intestine, so about ten times a day you blow off another portion. Or more than ten, way more. One patient from Minnesota farted an average of thirty-four times a day, with a record of 141. ‘He had very few friends,’ reported the New England Journal of Medicine.
Dutch military humour from Uruzgan.
Even in antiquity, warnings were issued on the dangers of suppressing your farts. After one of his guests died as a result, retching from bottled-up shame, the Roman emperor Claudius came up with a plan to prohibit such suppression. But he ran out of time to execute his idea, thanks to a murderous wife. ‘God only knows,’ sighed Montaigne centuries later, ‘how often our entrails have brought us to the very brink of an agonising death because we refused to release a single fart.’ But things aren’t usually as dire in actual practice. Gases, like fluids, can be absorbed by the intestinal wall and carried off with the blood. In the lungs they regain their freedom with a single breath. In this way a fart that was intended for the anus escapes through the mouth anyway. Fortunately, these don’t smell very much.
Air that isn’t burped or doesn’t pass into the bloodstream will meet the light of day via the anus sooner or later. The resulting farts come in two varieties: A farts and B farts. A farts don’t stink. They consist mainly of the nitrogen, oxygen and carbon dioxide from the swallowed air. The carbon dioxide from the air is supplemented by the gases that are produced in the extinguishing of gastric juices by the bicarbonate from the intestinal and pancreatic fluids. Bacteria also give off carbon dioxide. Hydrogen gas is released in the fermentation of starch, sugar and fibres, and in fairly large quantities: 12.5 litres is normal. About two-thirds of it takes the shortcut through the intestinal wall and the blood; the rest is converted into methane in half the human population. This half have the right bacteria to do the job, which manage to survive despite the lack of oxygen in the large intestine. They do the same thing outside our bodies in the oxygen-deficient ooze of the swamps, where their farts bubble up as marsh gas. The other half of the human population, those without methane bacteria, release a lot of hydrogen through the anus in an unchanged state. But methane or hydrogen, it doesn’t make any difference as far as flammability is concerned. Both gases burn nicely. Methane was the source of countless mine explosions, and hydrogen fed the flames that tragically consumed the Hindenburg dirigible. So it’s never a good idea to experiment with setting your own farts on fire. A bridegroom-to-be who tries it at his bachelor party can end up in hospital with blisters on his backside and scorched arse hair. And how many farmers’ sons have blown their chances at inheriting the farm by igniting the fart of a family cow? Burnt to a crisp.
Although its name suggests otherwise, marsh gas—methane—is just as odourless as nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen and carbon dioxide. Before it can call itself a B fart, a methane fart has to be spiced. A pinch is enough. So there are powerful odorants involved, including hydrogen sulphide. This gas is made from a vestige of hydrogen in combination with the sulphur from the breakdown of old, worn-out cells from the intestinal wall, or from plants such as onions, cabbage and garlic that contain large quantities of sulphurous amino acids. The food industry provides extra sulphur by adding this sulphite to bread, beer, wine, fruit juice, crisps and chips. It makes your food last longer and your farts stink longer.
There are other excrement smells that hitch rides with your farts. Indole, skatole and the methyl sulphides all contribute to a bouquet so strong that it can be detected in a concentration of one in a hundred million particles. The persistence of the smell has to do with ventilation, but it also has to do with the specific density of your farts. Floor van den Hout, writing in the journal Quest, calculated that density in an average compound at 0.92 kg/m3. That’s somewhat lighter than ordinary air (1.29 kg/m3). So with every fart you release your body doesn’t get lighter but heavier. The fart rises gently to nose height like a more lasting memory of a fleeting event. Kurz is der Furz, lang der Gestank, short is the fart, long is the stench.
Many farts are accompanied by a loud signal that lets everyone around know who the perpetrator was. The system is reminiscent of those horns with the flashing lights on old-fashioned Dutch canal barges. In the absence of marine telephones, skippers used to communicate with each other by means of horns. By using a kind of Morse code, they let each other know what their ship was planning to do: port, starboard, reverse or moor. But in the tangle of all those ships you’d have to know which one was doing the tooting. This problem was solved by pairing each audio signal with a flashing light. Similarly, you know where the stench is coming from by the sound of the fart, even though this particular tooter would rather have kept it secret. You don’t always have control over the volume of your farts. It all depends on how much gas has escaped. The sound is produced by the vibrating of your anus, which works just like the rubber mouthpiece on a deflating balloon. The pitch is determined by the diameter of the anal canal. A narrow opening produces a high tone, a wide opening produces a low tone. Sitting doesn’t make the tone higher but louder, especially if you do it on the toilet with the bowl as your sound box. Haemorrhoids have no effect on the pitch at all.
Because the sound is merely a physical phenomenon you can easily imitate it. Ever since the thirties, special ‘whoopie cushions’, designed on the basis of a deflating balloon, have been sold in so-called party shops. The balloon itself is flat, with an eloquent wooden mouthpiece. A forerunner was the musical seat, which came out in 1926. It consisted of a drum and a bellows that, according to the Johnson Smith mail order catalogue, sounded ‘as if you were sitting on a cat’. In the age of the computer, even the whoopie cushion has been electrified. Hundreds of thousands of ‘fart machines’ have been sold in shops and by post. They consist of a small speaker that you place under the chair of the person you intend to embarrass. With the help of a time exposure lever, the machine makes a clearly audible fart sound at the worst possible moment for the person sitting above it.
Judging from their etymologies, French farts are more powerful than English or German farts. In all three languages, farts are named onomatopoeically—a word that imitates the sound it describes, much like ‘bang’ or ‘boom’. In French, a fart is a pet, the ‘p’ at the beginning clearly indicating a loud pooty toot. The English and German words ‘fart’ and Furz have an ‘f’ instead of a ‘p’, which is quite a bit softer and less rude, although it’s the silent farts that are feared for their aromatic power. The Dutch, with the soft ‘w’ in wind or ‘v’ in veest, are among the softies. But it wasn’t so long ago that our forefathers, true men of valour, produced a genuine poep with two p’s, pronounced like the English ‘poop’ but referring to the gaseous and not the solid object. If the modern Dutch insist on emphasising the brute force of an exceptionally thunderous fart, they resort to the expressive gutterals that are part of their language and let loose a scheet, with its (for English speakers) barely pronounceable sch.
In polite company one just hopes that the wind one passes will be as gentle as possible, but sometimes a powerful blast of the horn is needed as a statement—an insult or a battle cry, if not a declaration of war. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, King Apries of Egypt released such a bellicose fart in 569 BC. When Apries gave orders to have the mutinous general Amasis apprehended, Amasis raised his buttocks from his saddle and farted, telling the messenger that he could take that back to the king. The king was so angry that he had the messenger’s nose and ears chopped off, at which the people rose up in revolt, the king lost, and the general, as the new sovereign, led his people through forty-four fat years. Six centuries later, few of the lessons of history had been learned in Judea. Shortly after the death of King Herod in AD 44, according to the Jewish-Roman historian Flavius Josephus, it was a fart that triggered a slaughter among the Jews:
When the multitude were come together to Jerusalem, to the feast of unleavened bread, and a Roman cohort stood over the cloisters of the temple, one of the soldiers pulled back his garment, and, cowering down after an indecent manner, turned his breech to the Jews, and spoke such words as you may expect on such a posture.
The crowd was incensed and a riot broke out. The Roman procurator sent in his troops, with disastrous consequences for the Jews. ‘The Jews were in a very great consternation, and being beaten out of the temple, they ran into the city, and the violence with which they crowded to get out was so great, that they trod upon each other, and squeezed one another, till ten thousand of them were killed, insomuch that this feast became the cause of mourning to the whole nation.’
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Yet this was but an incident compared with the disasters that flatulence has had the power to cause worldwide. One fart is irksome at the very most, while all our farts together are contributing to the greenhouse effect, and if you include the farts that animals produce it’s clear that we’re blowing the entire atmosphere to smithereens. By exhaling carbon dioxide, humans and animals make a substantial contribution to the air pollution that retains the earth’s warmth like a layer of the atmosphere, thereby throwing the climate into a turmoil. But the methane in all those farts and burps is twenty times worse than the carbon dioxide that usually gets all the blame. The methane from humans alone is more than the atmosphere can deal with, but add to that the methane from cows and it’s just too much. Cows produce a hundred times more methane than humans do. Dutch livestock alone fart and burp 100,000 tonnes of methane a year into the air. In the united States, cattle account for a quarter of the methane pollution, or 5 per cent of the greenhouse effect. In order to produce all that greenhouse gas, the cows in turn burn up 5 per cent of their feed, which can only be cultivated with the help of oil-guzzling, artificial manure-spreading and atmosphere-destroying agricultural machines. But the animals are capable of a lot even without our help. Three giraffes produce as much methane as one cow, and one elephant beats four cows to pieces. To say nothing of a whale. In his answer to a question from the audience about whether whale farts can be heard on his ship’s sonar, marine biologist Richard Martin started working out the calculations. Endangered or not, all the whales together fart a gigantic 200 billion litres a day. This filled Martin with both emotion and awe. ‘To know that whales fart, too, brings us closer together.’
Yet it isn’t the giants but the dwarves from whom we have most to fear: the termites, better known from travellers’ tales as white ants. These are the insects that come marching in enormous hordes to consume all your woodwork, preferably from the inside out, so that only the outside is left standing until the whole thing—kaboom!—comes crashing down. If you’re still upstairs you’ll soon be downstairs. The books of my childhood were quite clear on this subject. Men with wooden legs in particular were advised to watch their step in white ant country. Fortunately in the Netherlands it’s too cold for white ants. Up until now, that is. With their contribution to the greenhouse effect, the termites are making it more comfortable for themselves, even in our corner of the world. They’re helped by the microbes in their intestines, which digest the wood for them. For every bite they take they release a little fart. Because there are millions of them, all those mini-farts form a fart of impressive proportions, and with all the termite hills in the world the climate will ultimately be assaulted by a million times a million times a million farts. To be precise, the 2,500 billion termites on earth pump out 100 million tonnes of methane a year. ‘That’s a whole lot of methane,’ says one expert, ‘but it’s also a whole lot of termites.’
The problem with farting is you so rarely can do anything about it. Before you really feel the urge it’s often too late. Banning it doesn’t help. Lawmakers, who are human themselves, know that all too well, but that doesn’t stop them from issuing prohibitions. In Malawi a bill was introduced in 2011 authorising traditional leaders to punish inhabitants ‘who foul the air’. In response, American actress Whoopi Goldberg announced that she wasn’t going to travel to Malawi, at least not for the foreseeable future. She proposed an amendment to the bill: ‘He who smelt it, dealt it’. Whoopi should know. She owes her first name to her childhood friends, who called her that because she farted so much. ‘I was a walking whoopie cushion,’ she wrote in her autobiography. ‘I always call my farts tree monkeys, ’cause tree monkeys make the same farty sound as I do.’
How right she is. If you appreciate this kind of humour, your rectum and anus are always there to show you a good time. How many boring classes or lectures have been animated by a well-timed fart! There’s nothing more likely to induce a glorious giggle. And it’s an endless source of jokes. (As long as you like that sort of thing.)
A guy goes to the doctor. ‘Doctor, I can’t stop passing gas.’ The doctor considers the problem, walks to the back of the office and returns with a six-foot stick with a massive hook at the end. The guy blanches. ‘What are you going to do with that thing?’ ‘Open the window,’ the doctor answers. ‘No time to lose. I’m practically suffocating!’
A fart doesn’t amount to much compared with shitting and pissing, as a farmer in Goderich, Ontario, found out. Struck by an overpowering need to go while driving, and without a loo in sight, he pulled his car over, jumped out, and did his business. He was caught and fined eighteen dollars. Relieved by the small amount, the man handed the judge a twenty. ‘Keep the change, your honour,’ he said. ‘Who knows, I may need to fart someday!’
A veterinary tour de force from 1743.
But sometimes it’s just not funny anymore, and farting becomes a condition that has to be dealt with. A doctor can help, but the problems are usually more social than medical. Remedies are correspondingly more domestic.
To expel less air, you can try swallowing less of it. But that only eliminates the farts that were tame to begin with. We’re talking about the gale-force winds, the real stinkers. How do you get them under control? How do you make the billions of bacteria in your intestines so respectable that they only produce benign gas, and then in dribs and drabs? By putting them on a diet. Limit their food supply. The more of your food you consume yourself, in your small intestine, the less there is left over for the bacteria in your large intestine to ferment. Unfortunately, this means putting yourself on a diet. To stop the big farts in their tracks, you have to avoid certain kinds of foods that you don’t have the enzymes to deal with. One notorious example is milk. It contains a protein, lactose, that must be broken down in the small intestine by the enzyme lactase. Babies have lactase in abundance. Otherwise they wouldn’t be able to live from their mother’s milk. But some people experience a drastic reduction in the formation of lactase as they grow into adulthood. For Chinese, Arabs, Aborigines, Greeks and Italians, tolerating milk becomes increasingly problematic. It gives them stomach aches and diarrhoea, and makes them extremely sensitive. The fact that so many Europeans can tolerate milk probably has to do with their long experience with cattle breeding. Cattle breeders who could tolerate milk were one step ahead in the struggle for existence.
Unfortunately this never happened among tillers of the soil. Even after ten thousand years of horticulture, humans still don’t have the enzymes at hand to digest vegetables properly. They can’t deal with fibre or certain stubborn sugars, the oligosaccharides. These pass through the large intestine undigested, as food for the bacteria with their gas-rich eating habits. To silence a bubbling anus you’d have to give up vegetables like cauliflower and Brussels sprouts, onions and artichokes, radishes and lettuce, tomatoes and cucumbers. Wholewheat bread, soft drinks and sweeteners are also taboo. Even fruit can do harm: Adam’s first sin after eating the apple may very well have been the first fart. In addition to fibre, an apple contains a lot of air.
Beans are the worst culprit. Nothing contains so many proteins or so much fibre as oligosaccharides. The oligosaccharides in beans consist primarily of verbascose, but the fart of all farts comes from the bean of all beans, the soy bean, which is specialised in raffinose and stachyose. Every variety, every strain of bean has its own fart capacity. Actually this should be noted on every can of beans in addition to the other nutritional information, complete with the delay factor, so you know how long you can expect to be regarded as pleasant company after a meal of beans. In the case of brown beans, it takes six hours for the storm to reach its peak. For his Western parody Blazing Saddles, director Mel Brooks had to take considerable artistic freedom to get his cowboys to erupt in a barrage of farts right after a traditional meal of brown beans, which put all ordinary shoot-outs to shame.
Fortunately, not all vegetables are equally pneumatic, and each person has their own sensitivities. Those who have problems with flatulence—as a quarter of all Europeans and Americans do—can experiment with what does or does not agree with them. As for the remaining vegetables, you can try to tame them. With boiling water. That’ll teach them. Boiling increases the digestibility so there’s less food for the bacteria to fart. But be careful with cabbage. The longer you cook it, the more harmful sulphurous compounds are created, which you can clearly smell before you eat your Brussels sprouts and afterwards. By carefully regulating the cooking time you can control the balance between the before stench and the after stench.
Cooking is an attempt to break down the harmful substances, but you can also remove them beforehand. Let peas and beans soak in water the night before you plan to cook them. When you throw out the water, you’re also throwing out some of the oligosaccharides (and some of the vitamins too, actually). From 30 to 90 per cent of them are dissolved this way, depending on the type of bean. A more cunning approach is to get the bean to eat its own oligosaccharides. Let it sprout. In order to turn its bean into a bean sprout, the seedling partially eats itself up. Unfortunately, when a bean sprouts not only does it get rid of undesirable substances but the sprout itself produces additional oligosaccharides. This trick works better with dairy products. The bacteria that make cheese or yogurt from milk have already consumed the lactose before it can trouble you. But you have to give them plenty of time to get their eating done; from the point of view of flatulence prevention, cottage cheese is a rush job.
If subtraction doesn’t help, try addition. Countless remedies have been used down through the ages as carminatives, or drugs that relieve flatulence, from pepper to peppermint, from lemon to lavender oil. Most of them come from Asia, which is also home to the pneumatic kitchen. Cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon, ginger and cardamom are used to combat the flatulence produced by spicy dishes full of oriental seasonings. Asafoetida, better known as devil’s dung, is thought to be especially effective. It’s the gum extracted from the Ferula asafoetida plant, which itself smells of sulphur.
Of course there are all sorts of pills and powders available in health food stores and on the internet. Here, too, the carminatives are exceeded in both diversity and ineffectiveness by the aphrodisiacs, which are said to revive passion. Activated charcoal, sold under the commercial name Norit, absorbs the gas in the large intestine before it can do any harm, but in its enthusiasm it also swallows an array of medicines. And it turns your excrement a sinister shade of black. Scientifically, the most interesting are the remedies containing the enzyme that enable our bacteria, but not ourselves, to go after the feared elements in our food. By adding lactase drops from a bottle, for example, you can make milk digestible for people who normally cannot tolerate it, and you can calm bean-based flatulence by treating your beans to a few drops of the enzyme that breaks down oligosaccharides (alpha-galactosidase). But as long as we can’t teach the body itself to make those enzymes, these are just stopgap measures.
The expectation is that the wind produced by beans and grains is only going to pick up. Now that more and more people are eating wholewheat bread, vegetables and beans instead of white bread, chips and hamburgers, for their own health and the health of animals, their intestinal bacteria are going to be increasingly boisterous in their celebrations. Vegetarians in particular are walking aerosol cans. Those suffering from flatulence have to make a choice in the kitchen between health and offence. A sensible person is willing to tolerate a little bother for the sake of his health. A wise person will even see the humour in being such a nuisance. Flatulence is fun. You’re never bored with a fart up your arse. Across the globe a cloud of sulphur and skatole is rising from the literature to spice up human affairs.
If our civilisation began with the Greeks, then the first literary farts originated with the Athenian playwright Aristophanes. In Clouds (423 BC), he takes aim at Socrates’s atheism. If there’s no Zeus to make the heavens thunder, the old man Strepsiades asks him, where does the thunder come from then?
Socrates:
Have you not understood me then? I tell you, that the Clouds, when full of rain, bump against one another, and that, being inordinately swollen out, they burst with a great noise.
Strepsiades:
How can you make me credit that?
Socrates:
Take yourself as an example. When you have heartily gorged on stew at the Panathenaea, you get throes of stomach-ache and then suddenly your belly resounds with prolonged rumbling.
Strepsiades:
Yes, yes, by Apollo I suffer, I get colic, then the stew sets to rumbling like thunder and finally bursts forth with a terrific noise. At first, it’s but a little gurgling pappax, pappax! then it increases, papapappax! and when I take my crap, why, it’s thunder indeed, papapappax! pappax!! papapappax!!! just like the clouds.
Socrates:
Well then, reflect what a noise is produced by your belly, which is but small. Shall not the air, which is boundless, produce these mighty claps of thunder?
Strepsiades:
And this is why the names are so much alike: crap and clap.
It wasn’t until centuries later that the papapappax resounded in England in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (1386–1400). While Nicholas, an Oxford student in ‘The Miller’s Tale’, is secretly sleeping with the beautiful (but married) Alison, his lecherous rival Absalon pops up under the bedroom window and begs her for a kiss. She promises to give him one, just to get rid of him. Possibly instigated by Nicholas, Alison sticks her hairy naked buttocks out the window. Absalon gropes in the dark with his lips and becomes suspicious when he discovers there’s no nose between the supposed cheeks. He swears vengeance and goes to fetch a coulter from a nearby blacksmith. Thus armed, he comes back and asks for another kiss. That gives Nicholas an idea.
Now Nicholas had risen for a piss,
And thought he could improve upon the jape
And make him kiss his arse ere he escape,
And opening the window with a jerk,
Stuck out his arse, a handsome piece of work,
Buttocks and all, as far as to the haunch.
Said Absalon, all set to make a launch,
‘Speak, pretty bird, I know not where thou art!’
This Nicholas at once let fly a fart
As loud as if it were a thunder-clap.
He was near blinded by the blast, poor chap,
But his hot iron was ready; with a thump
He smote him in the middle of the rump.
For the greatest fun with the greatest filthiness, turn your sights to Germany and surroundings—and to the most unexpected quarter. Not only was Martin Luther a big fan of bathroom humour, but Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart got off on it as well. It’s a good thing the audiences in the grand concert halls didn’t know anything about the naughty letters Mozart had written to his mother (‘Bye-bye mama, Your loving son / Just let go another one’) and especially to his beloved cousin Maria Anna Thekla:
Ma très chère Cousine!
I now wish you a good night, shit in your bed with all your might, sleep with peace on your mind, and try to kiss your own behind. Oh my arse burns like fire! what on earth is the meaning of this!—maybe muck wants to come out? yes, yes, muck, I know you, see you, taste you—and—what’s this—is it possible? Ye Gods!—Oh ear of mine, are you deceiving me?—No, it’s true—what a long and melancholic sound!
From Ireland, finally, comes the limerick. The kind of humour that this poetic form depends on is a perfect match for shit and piss jokes. The punchline of the poem (if it’s any good), driven along by the strict metre, explodes like a thunderous fart. A classic example is the ‘Farter from Sparta’.
There was a young fellow from Sparta
A really magnificent farter.
On the strength of one bean,
He’d fart ‘God Save the Queen’
Or Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’.
He was great in the ‘Christmas Cantata’
He could double-stop the ‘Toccata’
He could boom from his arse
Bach’s ‘B-Minor Mass’
And in counterpoint, ‘La Traviata’.
The selection was tough, I admit,
But it did not dismay him a bit,
‘Til, with arse thrown aloft,
He suddenly coughed
And collapsed in a shower of shit.
The ‘young fellow from Sparta’ really did exist. Except he didn’t meet his end quite so miserably, and instead of farting ‘God Save the Queen’ he performed ‘La Marseillaise’. Born Joseph Pujol, he scored many a triumph as Le Pétomane. Dressed in white gloves, he would raise the tails of his coat and imitate the sound of a toad, a nightingale, a random dog, and a dog with its tail stuck in the door—all with a slightly anal accent. To the cry of ‘Gunners! Atten-tion! Ready—Aim—Fire!’, cannon shots would ring out through the Moulin Rouge, the centre of Oh-la-la in fin de siècle Paris and recognisable by the red windmill out the front (‘The blades of the Moulin Rouge—what a great fan for my act!’). The Pétomane even imitated farts. First was that of a little girl, then of a mother-in-law, followed by that of a bride on her wedding night (quiet) and on the morning after (considerably louder). To end his act, the Pétomane smoked a cigarette anally, played the anal flute and accompanied the singing of the enthusiastic audience.
Invariably they clapped for the wrong half of the act. The trick isn’t blowing out a candle or blaring all the notes of ‘Au clare de la lune’ but replenishing the air supply. You’d never be able to fart your way through ‘God Save the Queen’ if you ran out of breath by the time you got to ‘gracious’. But where to store an adequate supply of onions and beans? We happen to know how Pujol did it, thanks to a medical study from 1892. First, he blocked his breathing by bending himself almost double. Then he used his stomach wall to draw in outside air through his anus, as we do orally through our mouths with our chests. He was able to keep this up evening after evening. Encouraged by his success, he struck out on his own in 1894, for which he was sued for breach of contract. From Le Petit Journal: ‘At first the director of the Moulin Rouge thought of going after him and bringing him back with a few well-placed kicks in his… musical domain; but on second thought, fearing the harm he might do to the instrument, he decided to take the case to court and let the judge stick his nose in it.’ The director won, but Pujol’s vengeance was sweet. He unmasked his replacement—La Femme Pétomane—as a fake fartiste with a pair of bellows under her skirts. The Pétomane farted on alone with mixed success until the First World War, when gas was no longer a laughing matter. Resuming his old trade, he became a baker again. It wasn’t until the end of the Second World War that the ‘Nightingale of the Moulin Rouge’, age eighty-eight, breathed his last breath. A very quiet one. Nothing unusual about it.