Of the science of shit and disgust

If your ancestors liked to eat poop, you wouldn't have been born.

In this vast air-conditioned tent, in the gardens of the Indian presidential palace in New Delhi, Valerie Curtis utters this final sentence which I will reflect on for a long time, then addresses the waiters: “Give me tea, coffee, something hot, thank you!”

She observes with an expert eye the ballet of diners waiting in front of the buffet, it’s Gandhi’s birthday. The UN Secretary General and Prime Minister Modi have just congratulated each other for having built millions of toilets in Indian homes.

Valerie Curtis speaks more crudely. Two days earlier, at the Swachh Bharat convention, she addressed the plenary assembly, ministers, developers, the sanitation boss of the Bill Gates Foundation, entrepreneurs active in the sanitation sector. She looked like she had Tourette's Syndrome. Every two sentences, she pronounced the word shit (“shit”), or caca (“poo”): “When my brother introduces me to the table, he often says that I am very good at shit or that I am the queen of the pooh."

She had a bunch of smiling stool emoticons in her hand 💩. She said in essence: if we want to change the behavior of an entire people, we must stop considering shit as a taboo and the toilet as a repulsive place.

“Leaders have to give a whole bunch of rewards to those who build the best toilets. There are never enough medals. Always more medals! You have to create competitions between people so that they build five-star toilets. Pooping is cool. Having a nice bathroom is the best! This is how we will convince people who have been defecating outside since the dawn of time to go into a closed room to relieve themselves.

Pooing is cool!

Apart from the fact that she loves to talk about poo at the dinner table, Valerie Curtis is director of the environmental health group at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine . She has been instrumental in shaping India's communication programs to get the latrines built across the country put to use — she has done so in several African countries as well.

For her, it's all about emotion.

“No one wants to get near shit. It is an anthropological invariant. Our brain warns us that shit is going to make us sick. The very idea that shit stinks is autosuggestion, we were shaped to think that poop smells bad. That's how evolution works."

Valerie Curtis has published one of the most fascinating books I have read recently ("Don't look, don't touch, don't eat, the science behind revulsion"). It deals with disgust — on the edges of the pages are printed fake musty stains; it is repulsive. It opens with the exhaustive list of things that most revolt a little girl living in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh:

“Stools, urine, toilet, sweating, menstrual blood, blood splatter, cut hair, impurities from a newborn baby, vomit, smell of urine, open wound, saliva, dirty foot, eating with dirty hands , cooked food while on your period, bad breath, smelly person, yellow teeth, picking your nose, dirty fingernails, clothes that have been worn, flies, maggots, mice, mice in curry, rats, stray dog , meat, fish, pigs, fish smell, dog or cat saliva, flies on stools, liquid animal droppings, soap that has been used in latrines, dead rat, spoiled meat, meat with parasites, floor cloth wet, stickiness, rubbish, rotting rubbish, rubbish dump, sick person, hospital waiting room, beggars, touching an untouchable, congested trains, alcohol, nudity, kissing in public, betrayal.”

Fear of germs and xenophobia

Valerie Curtis connects all our disgust reactions — even those that are culturally circumscribed — to the PAT (Parasite Avoidance Theory), the theory of parasite avoidance : “Some of the most disgusting bodily fluids turn out to be the most deadly. Saddles aren't just revolting; they are the source of more than twenty gastrointestinal infections, including cholera, typhoid fever, rotavirus and other stomach parasites which are responsible for 750,000 child deaths per year.”

In this book, Curtis links nomadism to the need not to sleep where one defecates. It also shows how some of our lowest instincts are inherited from the fear of other people's germs: xenophobia, for example.

“40% of humans do not have access to a hygienically safe toilet. Less than one in five people wash their hands when leaving the toilet. We calculated that if everyone washed their hands with soap, we could save 600,000 lives a year.” In Ghana, Curtis helped create an advertisement for the soap. The woman comes out of the toilet and goes back to cooking for her children. She didn't wash her hands.

In post-production, a purple stain was added to her fingers, which drips onto the food and then onto her children's plates. “After running the ad for a year on the three national channels, our studies showed that handwashing practice increased by 13% after using the bathroom and 41% before eating.”

We are interrupted by a little boy who has just been awarded by Narendra Modi in the great hall of the presidential palace. He had written a very nice letter to praise the merits of the Prime Minister:

“Before, I was a dirty boy. I was defecating outside. After Swachh Bharat, I am clean. Thanks to our Prime Minister Modi.”

“We can have fun with what is happening, make fun of communication. But the time for toilets has come globally. Before, it was not sexy for an academic, for an international civil servant, for a behavioral psychologist or for an entrepreneur, to work on the toilet. Today, I brag about it.”

In India, Curtis does not deny the cultural obstacle of a religion (Hinduism) where the categories of pure and impure preside over almost all human actions and where only the lowest castes have historically the right to clean up excrement. "It's complicated here. But it's complicated everywhere. We're never gonna make shit look adorable. What you have to sell is pleasure, beauty, the joy of owning a toilet.”