Poets celebrate it with erudite creations. Composers and lyricists create memorable songs about it. Bookshelves are filled with tomes devoted to all aspects of growing, preserving, preparing and consuming it.

KEEBLE McFARLANE

Whole sections of magazines and newspapers are devoted to old and new methods of putting it together. Great portions of each country's economic activity are dedicated to raising, gathering, distributing and presenting this commodity. This commodity is central to many of our social activities, from birth through all stages of life right on to death. We are talking, of course, about food, without which life would not exist.

We dress up food and drink with herbs and spices, flavourings and colourings, texturing and preservatives and consume it with gusto and flourish. Food and drink are essential to christenings and birthday parties, weddings and funerals, welcomes and farewells, business negotiations, as well as serious discussions between representatives of countries. Eating is woven into every public aspect of daily life, whether ceremonial or mundane.

As the body breaks the food down and extracts what it needs for fuel and to repair worn-out or damaged parts, it discards the greater portion it doesn't need. But we don't like to talk much about that aspect of the life process. Whereas we consume food publicly with great show and relish, we repair to the most private places to dispose of what's left and when we do speak about it we do so squeamishly and in embarrassment. Many of the words we use to describe the material itself and the process of eliminating it are not considered polite.

The ones which we deem to be polite are often nonsensical euphemistic creations intended to separate us from the activity as much as possible.We could dismiss this squeamishness indulgently as a harmless idiosyncrasy, but it in fact condemns huge numbers of people to lives of disease and early death. International organisations estimate that 2.6 billion people - that's 40 per cent of the world's population - have no access to a toilet - any kind of toilet. This means they defecate wherever they can - in the bush, along railway tracks, in alleyways or abandoned buildings. You've probably never heard of the "flying toilet".

This is a somewhat facetious name for sewage disposal in Kiberia, a huge slum in Kenya's capital city, Nairobi. With a population estimated at between 500,000 and 750,000, it is Africa's largest slum.

Like all such informal settlements, there is no water supply, electricity or disposal for sewage or garbage. So most people defecate into easily obtained plastic bags and fling them into pathways, onto rooftops or any patch of open ground. The unsuspecting visitor could find himself in a messy situation by stepping on one of these "bombs".

Diarrhoea and dysentery, caused by water-borne pathogens, are common problems in many parts of the developing world, and they can be traced directly to poor or non-existent sanitation. They take the lives of 5,000 children each day, five times the number claimed by AIDS, and even more than those who fall prey to malaria or tuberculosis. Water contaminated by faecal matter is found to cause gynaecological and skin disorders in some poor rural areas.

I can remember the way older relatives would recoil when they spoke about diseases like cholera, which were common a century ago. Those scourges disappeared not because of any magic drugs or treatments, but because of the introduction of simple sanitation.

Not having sanitation is extremely expensive. The United Nations Development Programme estimates that illness and death resulting from poor sanitation and contaminated water cost countries in sub-Saharan Africa five per cent of the total Gross Domestic Product. It also finds that for every dollar a country spends on sanitation, it saves some nine dollars in the costs of health care, lost productivity and delayed economic development.

Statistics like these are what led Jack Sim, an energetic Singaporean, to found the World Toilet Organisation seven years ago. It began with just 15 members, and now has 151 member organisations in 53 countries. It is one of the few organisations to focus on toilets instead of water, which receives far more attention and money under the common subject of sanitation. Its anniversary date is November 19, so every year it observes the day as World Toilet Day. The latest meeting took place a couple of weeks ago in Macau, China, the Portuguese version of Hong Kong. In its short existence the organisation has managed to rack up quite an impressive record in focusing on the need for toilets - not necessarily flush toilets, which is what most in the developed world associate with.

There is, for example, the arbo-toilet, which some people promote in rural Africa. It consists of a pit about one metre deep, covered by a simple hut. After each use the person throws a little wood ash and dirt into the hole to keep down smells and to discourage insects. After a few months, when the shallow pit fills up, a new pit is dug, the structure moved, and the old pit used to plant a fruit tree. Studies have found that those trees produce far more fruit than when planted in regular soil. Talk about recycling!

A British writer, Rose George, has travelled extensively and used all kinds of defecation devices from the most modern Japanese toilets that wash and dry your backside to hole-in-the floor models in the slums of Dar es Salaam. Her new book, The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why it Matters, is filled with stories and statistics, covers both geography and history to demonstrate that the world's people face a huge problem of, literally, their own making. Not being able to talk frankly about it is at the root of how to deal with that problem: "The big issue there is a linguistic taboo. It's not considered a polite subject of conversation. This sort of spreads across the board .the best people don't want to work in sanitation; they want to work in water. It's just got more cachet."

As the cynics would say, "No s***!"

keeble.mack@sympatico.ca

Feeding the multitude

DANGEROUS PETS

Pepper Pot