Uncle John's Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader (38 page)

On the morning of June 28, 2003, Wild-Eyed & Wicked, an 11-year-old American Saddlebred and two-time World Grand Champion, was found in his stall at Kentucky’s Double D Ranch with a severely swollen left foreleg. His trainer, Dena Lopez, who had ridden the horse to both his championships, thought it was a virus. Then his stablemate, Meet Prince Charming, became sick—with a swollen left foreleg. Then three more horses at the ranch developed the same symptoms. A veterinarian was called…and he told Lopez to call the police; the left front forelegs of all the horses had been injected with a toxin. The horses’ conditions worsened over the following weeks, and on July 17, Wild-Eyed & Wicked was euthanized. Meet Prince Charming and one of the other victims, Kiss Me, were euthanized the next day. The other two horses
recovered. Wild-Eyed & Wicked is buried near the Hall of Champions in the Kentucky Horse Park in Lexington. Despite a lengthy investigation, the culprit was never found.

In April 2001, mares in Kentucky started having miscarriages, and foals started dying. Within a month, more than 500 cases were reported, severely damaging Kentucky’s world-famous horse-breeding business. At first, poisonous mushrooms were thought to be the cause, but there weren’t enough of them to support that theory. Scientists then made a correlation between the affected farms and black cherry trees, which produce naturally occurring cyanide in their leaves. How did the cyanide get from the trees to the horses? Researchers at the University of Kentucky solved the mystery: A very warm spring, followed by a frost, they reported, resulted in high concentrations of cyanide. Then an unusually heavy infestation of Eastern tent caterpillars arrived. The voracious bugs nested in black cherry trees and fed off their leaves—leaving abnormally large amounts of cyanide-laden feces in the area around the trees. Grazing horses consumed the toxic poop, which wasn’t enough to kill full-grown horses, but it was too much for foals or fetuses. If similar conditions ever converge again, the researchers noted, horse owners will now know what to look out for.

On October 11, 2005, Ned Sixkiller found six of his horses and one burro dead on his ranch in El Paso County, Colorado. The cause of death was originally ruled to be gunshot wounds, as punctures were found in the animals’ hides. But a closer examination found every puncture to be about ¾ ”deep, and no bullet fragments were found.

Cause of the puncture marks: unknown. Less than two weeks later, 16 horses were found dead on William DeWitt’s ranch, about a mile from Sixkiller’s. No exact cause of those deaths was found, but the veterinarian on the case said that the cause was probably a lightning strike—all the horses’ eyeballs had exploded, and in the three days they laid on the ground, no scavengers had eaten them, which is common for lightning-struck animals. That didn’t satisfy many of the people in El Paso County, who for years have reported seeing strange lights in the sky, as well as “black helicopters.” Many in the area believe the deaths were the work of UFOs.

It’s been said that archaeology is really the study of garbage. All those thousand-year-old pot shards and spearheads in dusty museums are just discards from ancient civilizations that give us a peek into the habits and behaviors of the people who lived in those times. So what would we learn about ourselves if we studied our own garbage today? Well, someone’s already done it. Spanning 30 years and 30,000 pounds of trash, The Garbage Project has sifted and sorted its way through the modern waste stream, from trash cans to landfills, collecting information and dispelling myths not only about the garbage itself, but about human behavior.

The project got its start in 1972 when some University of Arizona archaeology students compared fresh garbage from a low-income household and an upper-income household. Professor William Rathje was so intrigued by the concept of learning about people’s habits by monitoring their trash that he started teaching a Garbage Studies—or
Garbology
—class that grew into the Garbage Project. From 1973 to 2005, more than 1,000 students donned protective clothes (and got tetanus shots) to sort out household trash and landfill contents.

Their first project: studying the trash of 60 Arizona households in 1973. Students went door to door asking permission to go through garbage cans and, remarkably, people said yes. Garbage was then collected from the participating households and brought to the university, where pairs of students sorted it according to assigned codes. Some of the nearly 200 codes that were used: Beef–001; Other meat (not bacon)–002; Tissue containers–135; Crustaceans and mollusks–006; Peanut butter–017; Tortillas–029; Potato peels–044; Illicit drugs–105; Pet toys–156; Jewelry–164; Health foods–066; and TV dinners (including potpies)–094.

What they found the most of surprised them: wasted food.

They classified food waste as “edible or once-edible food.” That doesn’t include things like pits, rinds, bones, or peels—only food that someone could have eaten. Before the Garbage Project, there was no way to know how much food people actually wasted, but it turned out to be a lot. After more than 10 years and 6,000 households, the Garbage Project concluded that Americans wasted 10–15% of the food they bought, almost half of it fresh fruits and vegetables that rotted before they could be used.

What they found at the bottom of almost every garbage bag or container was something they called
slops
(sorting code: 069), a gooey mixture of coffee grounds, cigarette butts, bits of food, and unidentifiable gunk. A detailed analysis showed slops to be 28% cereal; 36% vegetables; 8% meat, poultry, and seafood; 8% fruit; 6% cheese and milk products; and 5% oils and fats.

Previous garbage studies had relied solely on interviews and questionnaires where people “self-reported” their habits. But when the Garbage Project compared answers on questionnaires to actual discards, they discovered many differences between what people
said
they did and what their garbage
showed
they did. The Project named some of the most common reasons:

1. The Good Provider Syndrome.
Heads of households who purchased and prepared the family meals regularly exaggerated the total amount of food their families ate by 10–30%.

2. The Lean Cuisine Syndrome.
People usually underreported how much junk food they bought and overreported how much fruit or “healthy” foods they bought. In one Tucson neighborhood, people underestimated their intake of potato chips by 81% and overestimated their intake of cottage cheese by 311%. People also consistently underreported their alcohol consumption by 40–60%. But watch out for teetotalers: Nondrinkers accurately reported how much alcohol drinkers in the household consumed.

3. The Rationality Principle.
People weren’t necessarily lying when they self-reported—they may have exaggerated somewhat, but they also just may not have remembered, or may have estimated incorrectly. There’s a disconnect between what people do and what they think they do. The Rationality Principle also applies to things like recycling and other “good” behaviors.

4. First Principle of Food Waste:
“The more repetitive your diet, the less food you waste.” People who ate the same foods regularly threw out the least amount of food. For example, only 5–10% of everyday sliced bread was thrown away, while 35–50% of specialty breads like muffins, or hot dog and hamburger buns, were discarded.

The Garbage Project also uncovered some odd behaviors.

• When a food shortage was reported in the news, people would actually buy
more
—and waste more—of the scarce product. During a 1970s beef shortage, for example, investigators found the rate of discarded meat, often still in its original packaging, was 9%. Once the “crisis” was over, the rate went down to 3%.

• In 1986, after news reports that fat from red meat was a cancer risk, the Garbage Report found a decrease in overall red meat consumption, as well as an increase in the amount of fat from red meat that was cut off and discarded. Sounds like a reasonable response to a health scare…until they also recorded a spike in deli meat, hot dogs, and sausage, which actually have much more harmful fat than red meat does. People who thought they were acting responsibly were actually hurting themselves more.

In 1987 Rathje expanded the Garbage Project to include landfills. Over the next dozen or so years, the archaeologist and his students dug up, cataloged, and studied the contents of 22 landfills across the United States and Canada. Again, the results were surprising.

For example, it was always assumed that things like food and paper would
biodegrade
, or break down, in landfills. The Garbage Project discovered just the opposite. They found well-preserved food in all of their landfill excavations, including a 15-year-old hot dog in Staten Island and a 16-year-old T-bone steak in Illinois that Professor Rathje described as “still in damn good condition. I’ve had steaks in my own refrigerator that looked worse.” They found a 25-year-old bowl of guacamole, so well preserved that it could be identified by sight. How did they know it was 25 years old? It was next to an old newspaper on which you could still read the date—it hadn’t biodegraded either.

In fact, they found even more well-preserved paper than food.
Paper in a landfill didn’t biodegrade so much as it
mummified
. Rathje estimated that paper, especially newspapers and telephone books, accounted for half the garbage in modern landfills. (Construction debris and yard waste came in second and third.) According to Rathje, finding so much well-preserved old food and paper proved that landfill biodegradation was “the biggest myth since Santa Claus.” Biodegradation does take place, he said, but at a much slower rate than people think. As a result, today there’s a major effort underway to keep organic material like food and paper out of landfills.

The University of Arizona no longer has a Garbage Project class, and Rathje now teaches at Stanford University. But though the Garbage Project itself is inactive, Garbology goes on. Programs at schools around the country teach kids the science of garbage and educate them on reducing waste and recycling more. With coauthor Cullen Murphy, Rathje also wrote a bestselling book on the subject called
Rubbish! The Archaeology of Garbage
and coauthored another,
Use Less Stuff: Environmental Solutions for Who We Really Are
, which spawned a Web site and newsletter. These days Rathje is interested in
exo-garbology
—the study of space junk. As an archaeologist, he wonders what will happen to all of the refuse from satellites and space stations left in orbit, and how (and when) all that garbage will return to Earth.

In the late 19th century, horses posed two significant municipal waste-disposal problems.

•
Dead:
New York City “disposed” of as many as 15,000 dead horses a year by dumping them in the rivers and bays (the bodies would sometimes wash up on area beaches) or sending them to rendering firms that would remove the “useful” parts for glue and fertilizer before boiling the rest down in giant vats.

•
Alive:
A horse of the time produced an average of 22 pounds of manure and a quart of urine per day which, since there were no “pooper-scooper” laws, was just “deposited”…on the streets.

 

WHAT’S THAT SMELL?
Flame

BACKGROUND:
During the 2008 Christmas season, Burger King sold a novelty cologne for men called Flame—designed to mimic the smell of flame-broiled beef patties. Flame was available only in limited quantities through Burger King’s Web site and at a single cosmetics boutique in New York called Ricky’s. Despite its scarcity and poor reviews (one critic likened the scent to “a Burger King when it’s burning down in a horrible grease fire”), within a week the entire stock had sold out. It originally cost $3.99, but bottles of the smelly beef water were soon selling for $70 on eBay. Demand was so high that Burger King relaunched the cologne in the summer of 2009 with a series of print ads featuring
America’s Got Talent
judge Piers Morgan, photographed nearly naked, next to the tagline “The scent of seduction with a hint of flame-grilled meat.”