Science Discovers the Key to Healthy Sausage: Baby Poop

One day, scientists were thinking about the sausage, a food item made from shoving bits of ground-up animal meat and bacteria into an intestine casing until it has the consistency and shape of a rather spry semi-erect phallus. The one thing missing from this delicacy, decided scientists, is baby shit.

Fun fact about sausages: a lot of them are made via bacterial fermentation, which is what causes the “tangy” sausage flavor many of you have come to love. The lactic acid responsible for fermentation either comes from the meat juices themselves or from commercially available bacteria. BUT, as Discovery points out, there is better bacteria out there: probiotic bacteria! It does a wide variety of wondrous stuff, including “burn away belly fat, treat depression, lower inflammation, prevent urinary-tract infections and fight infant gastrointestinal disorders such as constipation.”

So, if we were to ferment sausages using probiotic bacteria, we’d basically be one step closer to establishing a paradise on earth. (Can you even imagine burning belly fat and fighting constipation by eating hot dogs? I would be a very regular Olympic-level athlete if that were the case.) However, one tiny hitch: the microbes we’d be using would come from human feces, a substance that is not widely known for being a confectionery delight. And, because infant feces is richest in probiotic bacteria — not to mention “easy to obtain” — we’re talkin’ baby poop here.

This concept has already been put into practice in a laboratory setting: Spanish scientists recently made fuet, a Mediterranean pork sausage, using safe bacteria strains harvested from baby excrement. The sausages did not contain poop, just microbes from poop. According to a team of tasters, they were just like regular fuet — only healthier, lower in fat, and lower in sodium. The scientists tasted them, too, and thought they were “very good.”

As of now, though, no companies are interested in commercializing the prototypes.