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ChristianKl comments on Open thread for December 17-23, 2013 - Less Wrong
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Fecal implants do seem to have some health benefits.
There are people who do drink their own urine. Spirilina can be grown on urine.
Algae also have the advantage that they are signal cell organism with means that it's easy to introduce new genes into them via DIY-bio efforts.
That means you can easily change the way the stuff tastes and let it produce vitamins and other substances. If you want a cheap source of THC you can transplant the relevant genes needed to produce the THC into an algae and grow it at home in a way that isn't as easily discovered as growing hemp.
You can trade different algae species and get more interesting compounds than THC.
What are fecal implents?
Few people do, and I doubt that it will catch on; spirulina can also be grown on runoff fertilizer, which will probably sound more appealing to most people.
I think the parent post means fecal transplants which are a way to reseed the gut biota with something hopefully more suitable.
Oh, makes sense. That's not food, though; that's a very easy organ(?) transplant.
You don't transplant the organ but the feces. They get processed in the intestine. Stuff that enters the body to be processed in the intestine is food for some definition of "food".
But once you accept the goal to get feces into the gut, the way is only a detail that's open to change.
By the time that stuff is in the colon -- which is what gets transplanted -- it's not food any more. At least not for humans.
No, I know that the colon is not transplanted; the flora is. Hence the (?). Also, it hopefully doesn't get processed but rather survives to colonize the gut. Further, an enema would probably be far more effective, given its lack of strong acid and pepsin designed to kill the flora.
Sorry, typo. Should be fecal implants or stool transplants.
Sounding appealing is a question of marketing. Plenty of people prefer organic food that grown with feces of animals over food grown with "chemical" fertilizer. They even pay more money for the product.
I also think you underrate the cost of fertilizer for some poor biohacker in Neirobi who has plenty of access to empty bottles. Human urine should also be pretty cheap to buy in third world megacities.
Access to cheap natural gas and oil is also central for the current way of doing agriculture. Without having access to those resources for cheap prices resource reuse might be a bigger deal.
Good point. I doubt that that extends to abandoning food altogether, though.