Flush, p.28
Flush, page 28
Wastewater treatment agencies have learned to pick their battles. Some people, they’ve found, will never be swayed by facts. Other initial skeptics, though, have been won over by seeing the results for themselves. On a warm, early October afternoon in 2020, a mix of fog and smoke from distant wildfires had just lifted when I met Kristen McIvor at a community garden in Tacoma. McIvor sported a cheery yellow face mask festooned with bees, which matched the dozen or so groupings of sunflowers scattered throughout the one-acre garden. Other dots of color still decorated the plot as well: dark purple grapes and dahlias, pink tickseed, deep red tomatoes, vibrant green onion leaves, and other vegetables that I couldn’t immediately identify. The residents who tend this garden, adjacent to the city’s Swan Creek Park and Salishan neighborhood of mixed-income homes, are among the most diverse in the county. They hail primarily from Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, and northern Africa and speak seven languages among them, McIvor said. It seemed more than a little fitting that the soil that bound them all together here was something that they had all personally contributed to.
For gardening and farming, TAGRO has been developed into several blends. One of the most popular is a potting soil mix that includes biosolids, sawdust, and aged bark. As a graduate student in Brown’s lab in the aughts, McIvor was interested in urban food production and food sharing, and focused her research on using the soil product to create a community gardening program in Tacoma. Once she began working with the organic matter, she had a revelation: “Oh my gosh, this is the best thing ever when it comes to gardening in areas that have poor soil, or anywhere really. It’s like gardening for dummies.” The potting soil worked so well that McIvor and her colleagues built instant gardens atop gravel parking lots. There’s even a TAGRO blend for green roofs, and another used by some growers in the state’s marijuana industry, a veritable pot-to-pot medium.
As her academic work progressed, McIvor worked at the TAGRO facility and started organizing in support of policy changes to improve community health. In 2010, the government-supported Pierce Conservation District launched a new program called Harvest Pierce County, with McIvor as its director. A decade later, she had overseen the opening of more than eighty community gardens and a food forest. Each is managed by the gardeners themselves, who come up with their own rules and charter. The organization has been careful to offer options for its free soil deliveries: either TAGRO or a more traditional compost made from yard waste. Only a handful have opted for the latter, McIvor said; many hesitant gardeners were quickly won over by demonstrations showing how quickly a neglected urban lot could become a bountiful vegetable garden.
Since 2012, Harvest Pierce County’s Share the Harvest Project has distributed more than 140,000 pounds of garden produce to food banks. Some of the more ambitious sites, including a gardening group that has drawn heavily from the US military’s Joint Base Lewis-McChord and a former Intel campus, have experimented with greenhouses, solar-heated hot water, smartphone apps, and other methods to get a jump on the growing season and maximize their donations. “Most people when they talk to me about what they like about their community garden, it’s not about tomatoes or having more vegetables,” McIvor said. Some are indeed seeking more food security for their own families, but most want to supplement their diet while doing something fun and interesting and getting to know their neighbors. Healthy soil, in other words, can build communities both in the ground and above it. Some friction is understandable when diverse groups work together, but gardening has provided valuable lessons in democratic decision making, however messy, for groups that are unaccustomed to it. And being outside and physically active, connected to both food and to nature, she said, can be incredibly healing.
For some gardeners, beloved plots have become essential parts of their lives. When a community garden at Tacoma Community College was threatened by a construction project in 2015, a columnist at the Tacoma News-Tribune filmed a video segment that captured the distress of Roza Nichiporuk, a gardener who tended her plot daily. When asked about her reaction to the news, an interpreter and fellow gardener replied on Nichiporuk’s behalf: “She thought she get, have heart attack. So upset. She didn’t sleep three nights.”
“What will you do if you can’t have a garden?”
“She says, ‘I will die.’”
The journalist interviewing them, incredulous, laughed. “No, no, that’s not true!”
The two women smiled. But the interpreter conveyed Nichiporuk’s profound attachment: “She is here, two, three times a day. I see her morning, evening, and sometimes day. She works hard. She loves. It’s her life.” McIvor and Harvest Pierce County were able to intervene and develop a governance structure to ensure that the garden remained intact.
The program has excelled at forming partnerships, including with the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department’s Eastside Family Support Center, whose clients are mainly Latino. McIvor and I stopped at a small adjacent community garden. Most of the crops there had been harvested, but I spotted some corn, tomatillos, and squash. She pointed out an unused pile of TAGRO, and we both stuck our hands in it. Like slightly warm, loose dirt. A faint ammonia smell; most of it had dispersed with time.
McIvor had something else to show me. From the success of the small community garden, the center’s director and a core group of gardeners began brainstorming uses for a long and narrow vacant lot down the hill, a fenced-off acre and a half on the other side of a bare-bones park and past a mass of invasive Himalayan blackberries and spiderwebs. On what was once Puyallup tribal land that was now owned by Tacoma Public Schools, gardeners from the Puyallup tribe were partnering with a group of Purépecha people from Mexico. The Indigenous groups wanted a space for people to learn about precolonial foods and traditional medicines and plants. A place to teach those Purépecha and Lushootseed words to their children, including the ones at the Puyallup tribe’s Grandview Early Learning Center on the other side of the lot. From the ground up, they were replanting their words and wisdom and values and culture. “I feel like this garden is the culmination of everything we’ve learned over the past ten years,” McIvor said.
Six gardeners from each group had jointly enrolled in a traditional medicine course and had just finished their first class together when the pandemic struck, slowing the project’s momentum. Even so, we saw two different kinds of squash grown by one of the Purépecha gardeners. Purhu, they’re called. And we saw patches of vivid orange where he was growing marigolds—apátsicua—in anticipation of Day of the Dead. During the Mexican holiday, families remember and venerate their dearly departed, with the marigold’s bright petals and fragrance luring the souls back to visit their relatives. The gardening site itself had been blessed before the gardeners broke ground, though both groups agreed that another cleansing ritual was necessary to clear away the negative energy that had accumulated in the lot over the decades.
Other projects were pressing onward as well. Despite the budget crunch triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, Mihle said King County was hoping to launch a small-scale composting pilot at one of its three treatment plants, pending its ability to meet odor control and other air-quality standards. If it took off, Mihle said she could envision future partnerships with smaller treatment facilities that could bring their own biosolids to a regional facility for conversion into garden-safe compost instead of shipping it to faraway landfills. Locally produced compost, Mihle mused, could grow equity and social justice as well by helping to fill in urban food deserts and expand green spaces.
Repurposed waste clearly won’t solve everything, but I marveled at how it had been a catalyst that brought so many people together. In our own yard, Geoff and I bickered over inconsequential things like how to trim the ferns and whether to plant more peppers and Oh my God, why are you putting that there? We were humbled by our gardening failures and cried at the mounting toll of a mentally exhausting year. On Election Day in 2020, not knowing what else to do, I began planting the first of more than one hundred tulips.
But good shit makes things grow. And in the spring, the tulips put on a stunning show for the neighborhood: pink and lavender and deep purple and double pink-and-white that played off the wallflowers and azaleas and Japanese andromedas with their delicate spring leaves. Nearly everything, it seemed, was growing like a weed, including the actual weeds that were overtaking some of the vegetable beds.
Maybe we would scale back just a bit on the food crops, which was just as well given our new project in a sloping section of the side yard beneath a red cedar and two Douglas firs. The soil had badly eroded over time, leaving a barren patch surrounded by a few native plants that we had tried to nurture and by more invasive plants that we were continually beating back. After leveling off parts of the slope and bringing in better soil and compost, we set to work picking out more native plants to fill in the space. Evergreen huckleberry and Cascade Oregon grape. Red-flowering current. Nodding onion and Oregon iris and Western spirea and false Solomon’s seal.
This time, I knew the perfect compost to give our new plants a healthy boost. To get some TAGRO, though, I would have to hurry. The distribution center was closing soon for the workers’ lunch break, and I wanted to load up on bags of the slightly pungent but potent plant food ahead of a weekend of gardening. And so I hopped into my Subaru and set out in search of someone else’s recycled poop.
I CELEBRATED A MAKESHIFT Oktoberfest at a neighbor’s picnic table on a sunny September evening. They contributed a plate of green olives, Manchego cheese, and liver paté, and I contributed a cold four-pack, judging scorecards, and pretzels as a palate-cleanser. The light blue beer cans I had brought for the occasion, each prominently labeled “Pure Water Brew,” held sixteen ounces of handcrafted ale made for a unique brewing competition. “Quality not History,” the cans read. And “Dam good” next to the illustration of a beaver. The beers were indeed good, with an American pale ale edging out a light hybrid as the winner of our decidedly amateur scoring.
The evening taste test might have been unremarkable if not for the fact that we were participating in an urgent water conservation effort. Additional text on each can explained that the beer had been brewed with “100% pure RECYCLED H20.” Some fine print running up the side offered additional context: “(1) All water has been consumed before and will be consumed again. (2) Made with the purest water on the planet. (3) Clean water is closer than you think.”
In this case, the clean water had come from sewage effluent treated by Oregon’s Clean Water Services utility and then run through a separate three-step purification process. The demonstration project’s recycled water is so clean that brewers add minerals back to replicate the water of famous brewing cities: a Burton-on-Trent profile for a dark Burton ale, say, or the water of Munich for a brown dunkel lager or the profile of the Czech Republic’s Plzenˇ for a pale Pilsner. “Brewers are water quality experts, and they really couldn’t believe that they could have this blank slate,” Mark Jockers, the utility’s government and public affairs manager, told me. Initially, water regulators couldn’t quite believe it either. When it launched in 2014, the brewing project failed to secure permission from Oregon’s Department of Environmental Quality to use purified wastewater as its starting material. Could the project instead purify water from the Tualatin River immediately downstream of the treatment plant’s effluent discharge site? “Now the regulator said, ‘Oh, sure! That’s fine,’” Jockers recalled. “We call it the waters of amnesia: once you take effluent—cleaned wastewater—and you put it in a body of water, it magically becomes water again. Whereas if you didn’t put it in the body of water, then, oh my God, it’s like nuclear waste, right? People are so anxious about this stuff.”
So are animated reindeer, apparently. In one of our household’s favorite Disney movies, Frozen II, Sven the reindeer is drinking from a stream when Olaf the snowman shares one of his many bits of trivia, though this time he pairs a scientific myth with a truth. First the myth: “Water has memory.” It does not, in fact. Water is agnostic as to what was previously in it or what it was previously in. That’s good because the second part of Olaf’s wisdom-dispensing is widely considered true: “The water that makes up you and me has passed through at least four humans and/or animals before us.” Sven then promptly spits out the water.
Estimating how many living things a water molecule has passed through is a bit tricky, but research suggests that yes, the water within us has been in multiple other living things in the past. But because it has no memory, the slate can be wiped clean with every reuse, leaving nothing more than two hydrogen atoms to every one oxygen atom in H2O. Scientists believe that all water on Earth was originally seeded from cosmic gas clouds, space dust, or meteorites that delivered the necessary hydrogen and oxygen billions of years ago. Since then, the planet’s water cycle has been a continuous closed loop of use and reuse.
Charles Fishman, author of The Big Thirst, explained the take-home message in an interview on National Public Radio:
So all the water on Earth—the water in your Evian bottle, the water in your glass of water, the water you use to boil a pot of spaghetti—all that water is 4.3 or 4.4 billion years old. No water’s being created on Earth. No water’s being destroyed on Earth. And what that means is the whole debate about reusing wastewater is kind of silly, because all the water we’ve got right now has been used over and over again. Every drink of water you take, every pot of coffee you make is dinosaur pee, because it’s all been through the kidneys of a Tyrannosaurus rex or an Apatosaurus many, many times, because all the water we have is all the water we have ever had.
On a shorter timescale, downstream cities routinely reuse river water that has passed through the kidneys of their upstream neighbors before being treated and released back into the river.
Those of us who are lucky enough to drink clean tap water aren’t normally forced to consider where it’s been and contend with our own disgust. We don’t have to, just as we don’t normally consider how many of the bacterial and yeast strains we depend upon to ferment foods and beverages have also passed through the intestinal tracts of our ancestors or other animals. Like the other things we expel, they too can be reused. Scientists and engineers, in fact, are borrowing a page from nature to demonstrate how we can safely reclaim drinking water and the starter cultures for fermented and probiotic foods. Purifying and repurposing the by-products of what we drink and eat could help ease potable water shortages worsened by global warming and pollution and address nutritional deficiencies worsened by poor sanitation and food insecurity. The main limitation to doing both isn’t technical, but as Sven the reindeer suggested, psychological.
Consider the curious case of a new kind of fuet, a Mediterranean-style sausage made from cured pork and fat. Professional tasters agreed that a specialty version handcrafted by researchers at the Institute of Agrifood Research and Technology in Girona, Spain, was especially tasty. Yet the fuet didn’t attract a single company interested in commercializing it. The problem, it seems, derives from the provenance of the bacteria used to ferment the meat and give it its zesty tang: baby poop. The study, “Characterization of Lactic Acid Bacteria Isolated from Infant Faeces as Potential Probiotic Starter Cultures for Fermented Sausages,” certainly attracted notice, if not eager sausage-makers.
Why use such an unusual source for the fermentation process? Beyond its profusion of biological markers, baby poop is unusually rich in the probiotic Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium species more widely associated with yogurt. Researchers at the institute isolated and grew the bacteria from forty-three healthy infants’ soiled diapers and tried a variety of curing combinations to see which species might work the best. The microbes then feasted on carbohydrates added to the pork, producing the preservative lactic acid as a by-product. This fermentation process, the researchers reasoned, could turn the sausage into another probiotic food. To work, though, the microbes would need to survive the acid trip down the human intestinal tract. So the food scientists focused on species that are already present in our intestines and relatively easy to get (and baby poop is, as we know, readily abundant). If the end product wasn’t exactly a hit, the process helped confirm the intrinsic value of our inner fermenters.
Based on the same rationale, researchers at Wake Forest University in North Carolina developed a probiotic “cocktail” composed of ten Lactobacillus and Enterococcus strains that they had likewise collected from infants’ dirty diapers. When fed to mice, the baby-bottom mixture raised the rodents’ production of short-chain fatty acids, which are critical for a healthy gut. The science of probiotics is still in its, well, infancy, and many health claims have withered under closer inspection. But some of the emerging results suggest that bacteria derived from healthy infants could be used as probiotics to aid adults—potentially opening the door to an entirely new line of specialty food.
When we hear about how water and microbial cultures can be recycled from our poop, though, we run up against the same cognitive dissonance that prevents us from reimagining how a substance long associated with disease could be a medicine or a soil amendment. As with food, the line of questions about what form of reclaimed water we might accept becomes a kind of Dr. Seussian exploration of disgust, Jockers said. “Would you drink it in a beer? Would you drink it in a vodka tonic? Would you drink it as water? Would you drink it in baby formula?” Even a scientist might hesitate on the final question, he said, despite knowing intellectually that it’s the same water. Multiple municipalities have struggled with the third question, as vocal “toilet to tap” opponents of water reuse projects—including Miller Brewing Company, ironically—harnessed the power of disgust and stigma to drown out explanations of the benefits and assurances of safety. In Australia, opponents called it “sipping sewage.”
