Scientists in Spain—I just wretched—are experimenting with a new type of functional food, creating fermented sausages packed with probiotics—Oh, jeez—grown from baby feces starter. Yes, that’s the equivalent of baby-crap sourdough. MORE: Kombucha: Wonderful or a Big Waste of Money? To be an effective probiotic-delivery system, the sausage must contain bacteria “well-adapted to the fermented sausage environment,” researchers noted, tough enough to withstand all sorts of digestive acids to reach the necessary destination: the stomach. The hardiest probiotic the scientists could find? Lactobacillus strains isolated from fecal matter scraped from diaper bins. Researchers found these Lactobacilli strains could survive both our bodies’ harsh gastrointestinal tract conditions and the salt-curing process of sausage making—no big surprise on the latter, seeing that these strains basically came out of a sausagelike environment, intestine-wrapped and all. This profound piece of science earned the researchers this year’s Ig Nobel Nutrition Prize. But does this mean you’ll be able to buy sausage with baby poop at your local delicatessen some time soon? Unfortunately not, as the food will be probably be backed up (get it?) with regulation for some time. But when the functional food does drop, study author Margarita Garriga told Vice Media’s Munchies website that the sausage tasted “Fine!” What’s more, an “expert panel” had no idea if they were eating regular old sausage or the baby-poop, intestine-wrapped herald of our dystopian future.
