Huckleberries Online

Would You Drink it?

Posted by Cindy

May 21, 2009 10 a.m. • 12 comments

Evidently, the economic crisis has hit NASA hard. These poor astronauts must have been awfully thirsty: http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2009/may/21/astronauts-toast-nasa-ingenuity-sip-recycled-urine/

I’m all for recycling, but thoughts of a sweat and urine cocktail make me queasy.

Would you drink recycled urine? What’s the most unusual drink you’ve consumed?

12 comments on this post so far. Add yours!

toadman on May 21 at 11:57 a.m.
There’s nothing wrong with recycled bodily fluids, once the waste is removed, its just clean water again. Of course I’d drink recycled pee…survival is worth getting a little pissed, don’t you think?
spokelooneh on May 21 at 12:04 p.m.
THEY’RE COMING FOR OUR PRECIOUS BODILY FLUIDS!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1KvgtEnABY
toadman on May 21 at 12:11 p.m.
heh…that movie rocked.

But hey, that’s ok, Soylent Green is people, and it’s so refreshing too.
piah on May 21 at 1:10 p.m.
I had homemade “beer” in Lesotho. It looked like skim milk and tasted like smokey water with a hint of cream.
I guess it’s made of corn and the smokey flavor comes from the fires it’s made over.
Just had one sip - wasn’t bad tasting - but I worried about what else has been in the used tin can it was served in :-)
Bent on May 21 at 1:21 p.m.
Pia, geez, it looked like skim milk? Yuck.

Technically, the first stage of a corn whiskey is a corn beer, but it’s not beer in the tradtional sense. They make a beer with a mash and distill the water and yeast out of the beer to make whiskey.

As for drinking recycled urine, heck I would drink my dog’s urine straight if they would let me fly space shuttle into space!
Kendramama on May 21 at 1:54 p.m.
Hasn’t anyone read “Dune”? Remember the stillsuits they wore on that forbidding planet, the ones that allowed spice harvesters and such to reclaim all their excreted moisture, available by sipping through a handy-dandy straw hooked around the ear?
Not such a bad idea, really… as long as the filtration process was TOTALLY taste-eliminating.

As for the most bizarre/disgusting thing I’ve ever drunk personally, it was precisely for that reason: to get drunk. We’d make a nasty concoction in jail, known by various names- Pruno, Hooch, others I can’t recall at the moment (in fact, I believe even just recounting this is making me a bit nauseous).
Anyway, the process involved filling an empty shampoo bottle with a combination of wadded up bread (for the yeast), orange slices (self-explanatory I hope) and a dash of the pre-sugared Kool-Aid packets they used to sell off commissary. That last was the most vital ingredient, and one that the staff eventually caught onto and swiftly removed from the commissary list. Now they sell tiny little sugar-free powdered drink tubes on there, from what I hear anyway.
What was hilarious though, back when we would make that awful brew, was when during the several day process of it fermenting, sometimes someone would forget to “burp” the shampoo bottle: letting the gas escape created by the fermentation process. Pressure and cheap plastic don’t mix too well… sometimes it would happen in the middle of the night, a resounding BOOM! that would signify the explosion of an ooey-gooey mess and, if the guards heard it, instant lock-down for all of us. (We would always stash the bottle in the dayroom trash can just for that reason- it was easier to claim innocence if it was in a common area than if it happened to explode in one’s own footlocker.)
But, if the process DID complete itself, we would swig the foul, slimy booze, strained through an old t-shirt but still full of floaties and faintly tasting of shampoo; then stagger around giggling like idiots for a few hours, then suffer the always accompanying rancid hangover afterward. GROSS, huh?
Sisyphus on May 21 at 2:06 p.m.
Great story Kendra. Keep writing. And yes, Dune was the first thing I thought of when I read the article.
JeanieSpokane on May 21 at 3:04 p.m.
Yes, great story, Kendra. I wonder how many people are right now checking for empty shampoo bottles and orange slices. Just for a test, you see.
BayviewBob on May 21 at 6:48 p.m.
There isn’t a drop of water on this planet, that at one time or another, wasn’t in someones or somethings bladder.

It’s all been recycled. :)
Escapee on May 21 at 9:04 p.m.
If it’s all been recycled, BayviewBob, well, that’s fine. I just don’t want to drink anything with a yellowish tint to it. As far as the Space shuttle, can’t they perhaps figure out a way to drag a big block of ice behind the space shuttle? They could then drag it into the shuttle every now and then when the water supply ran short. No amount of training could get me to drink someone’s (insert appropriate alphabet letter here…).
Stickman on May 21 at 9:47 p.m.
If you are thirsty enough or hungry enough, you will drink or eat anything that is available.
fortboise on May 23 at 6:08 p.m.
“…wadded up bread (for the yeast)…”

Huh, I would think yeast pretty much gives up its life for the loaf, but there’s more where it came from. Yeast is in the air (can you feel it?), and if you just leave something fermentable exposed to it, enough “wild yeast” will join the party. They’d be munching on the bread.

The oranges might have improved the taste, but the more likely benefit is that the citric acid would lower the pH to where the yeast were happy.

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D.F. Oliveria is a columnist and blogger for The Spokesman-Review. Huckleberries Online was judged the best 2008 Idaho newspaper blog by the Idaho Press Club. And the best 2007 news blog in the Pacific Northwest by the Society for Professional Journalist. Print Huckleberries is a past winner of the Herb Caen Memorial Column contest by the National Association of Newspaper Columnists. The Readership Institute of Northwestern University cited this blog as a good example of online community journalism.