Help me follow up on a trivia fact I encountered as a kid!

April 7, 2024 6:45 PM

Recently, I had a memory knocked loose of a Big Books of Facts for Kids fact from childhood: "there is a society where being seen eating is shameful, but no taboos around pooping." I hadn't thought about it in decades until someone mentioned it exactly thus, and tried to look up a source, but haven't found anything. Does anyone else remember this and/or have details? It feels like a fable about how social mores aren't universal, especially given my inability to track down evidence that it was ever real beyond the book I encountered it in.
posted by DoctorFedora to Grab Bag (13 answers total)

Not sure if this helps, but this is a detail in Jay Lake's short story "The Lizard of Ooze" anthologized in The New Weird.
posted by sagc at 7:40 PM on April 7 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Also depicted in Luis Buñuel's 1974 film Le Fantôme de la liberté.

As far as I'm aware, this is a fictional trope. The only way I can imagine this behaviour emerging in real life is under starvation conditions where to be seen eating would reveal food hoarding, and I don't believe a society could sustain itself under such conditions for long enough to get this strongly established as a social norm.
posted by flabdablet at 9:48 PM on April 7 [4 favorites]

Response by poster: Yeah, it was the sort of thing I encountered in a Big Book of Facts as a kid and never really thought about, especially because back then there was no real way to follow up on that sort of thing. Logically it seems pretty unlikely to happen, right? Especially because the disgust response to poops is pretty much evolutionarily innate. I could see maybe, MAYBE a society developing a sense of shame surrounding eating, but that's the sort of thing that is so routinely vital that it really doesn't seem very plausible for taboo fodder.
posted by DoctorFedora at 12:18 AM on April 8

Not pooping, but sex: https://www.hawaii.edu/PCSS/biblio/articles/2000to2004/2004-sexual-behavior-in-pre-contact-hawaii.html
posted by spindrifter at 4:42 AM on April 8

I was once talking with a person who'd been a volunteer aid worker on a small island where people did their pooping on the beach at low tide. There was a women's beach and a men's beach, so it was gender divided, but otherwise you were right out there in full view if it was daylight. They said the hardest part initially was deciding whether it felt more comfortable, as someone used to having privacy, to face the land, or face the sea.

The point being, not everywhere has the same intense pooping = total privacy norms, either because of necessity (no choice but to defecate publicly) or just different practices. But outside of the Buñuel film, I'm not aware of any society that has things reversed between eating and defecation in that way.
posted by Dip Flash at 5:49 AM on April 8 [1 favorite]

This idea appeared in an old science-fiction short story I read a very long time ago, in which humans were visiting a society on a different planet. I couldn't say what the title was.
posted by adamrice at 6:15 AM on April 8 [1 favorite]

adamrice, I believe it was one of Robert Heinien's juvenile novels about 3 boys who sign up for space training, end up as first humans to meet aliens who needed privacy for eating.
posted by b33j at 7:21 AM on April 8 [1 favorite]

Nothing about eating, but Open Defecation is practiced by about 1/12th of the world's population. It tracks with the availability of sewage infrastructure but there are cultural reasons as well.

For example:

1. Superstition
   • Defecating in toilet causes one to be possessed by evil spirits.
   • Shared toilets are associated with evil spirits and therefore should avoided.
   • Using same toilet with people in the other houses causes one to lose his/her social status.
   • Defecating in public toilet causes one to lose his/her magical powers.
2. Traditional norms
   • Feces is not things to be kept in homes/ in toilet in the house.
   • Girl who are in their menstrual periods are not supposed to defecate in toilet.
   • Children can defecate in the open since their feces are considered harmless.
3. Traditional values
   • Defecating in the open (bush, beaches) signifies continuation of ancestor’s way of life.
   • Contact with human feces is unacceptable. (so it really doesn't belong in the house)
4. Taboos
   • Defecating in an enclosed place (inside toilet) is a taboo.

You'll note the listed taboo is almost exactly the opposite of a lot of the world's privacy mandate.

Of course defecating in the open doesn't necessarily mean people want to do it around others. In some places people do seek out a handy bush or tree, but in others it's everyone down to the beach at low tide.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 10:30 AM on April 8 [2 favorites]

All very interesting but what's the Big Books of Facts for Kids that contains this Trivia Fact?
posted by Rash at 6:18 PM on April 8

Response by poster: I wish I could answer that! I seem to recall it was one of those big thick ones printed on cheap thick newsprint, but it might have also only felt big because I was a small child at the time. I feel like it also contained other alleged facts like "sometimes antelopes or gazelles or something will just kind of offer themselves to be eaten by lions" that sound real iffy
posted by DoctorFedora at 6:39 PM on April 8

From memory, the Heinlein book is ‘Space Cadet,’ and several of the, well, cadets are stranded on Venus for a while. The native people are like dragon/dinosaur beings, and eating is a very private activity. In one scene one of the boys shocks the captors by accusing them truthfully of not even giving them private areas to consume nourishment! Who are the barbarians now? The ploy works and their relative position as barbaric prisoners is reevaluated.
posted by Occula at 10:48 PM on April 8

Occula: "From memory, the Heinlein book is ‘Space Cadet,’"

Hah! OK, there are at least two science-fiction stories involving this idea then (does that make it a trope?). Because I am quite sure I never read Space Cadet.
posted by adamrice at 5:18 AM on April 9

Oh, and I’m not sure how I forgot this but the Romans were totally into defecation as a social event and also a public service.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 7:31 AM on April 9