What do people actually think about growing food on human manure? That is what undergraduate students from Computational Social Science at the University of Amsterdam investigated. In doing so, they found differences between cultures and men and women. "Human dung is the future," they argue in conversation with Folia Magazine.
Due to a lack of funding in the Netherlands, the opinion research was conducted elsewhere, in England and Japan to be precise.
The students found major differences between the two countries. For instance, the Japanese were more open to eating food grown using human manure but were reluctant when it came to using it in public parks. For the English, the exact opposite was true: they were more concerned about health risks related to the presence of traces of pharmaceuticals, drugs, or other harmful substances.
The hope is that the study can also be carried out in the Netherlands one day. However, interviews were already conducted with people in North Holland. These showed that people were generally very positive about the use of human manure.
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