What I can tell you is this: we went down to Central Java with a colleague, and we were going around to the villages to talk to people. This involves showing up at the village head's house, introducing yourself, and asking who's who and what's what. At some point the village head's wife or child will bring out some fruit and glasses of tea. By the end of the day we were always stuffed with fruit and tea.
Anyhow, at one such house we were chatting with the chief and a friend of his. Just as the tray of snacks came out, the friend informed us that, to improve his health, he drank a glass a day ... of his own urine.
He assured us he'd learned about this practice from an American TV show. Oddly enough, some of the elderly Russians I worked with years ago in Boston also used to drink their urine, and they had also gotten this notion from TV, which just goes to show you television is even worse for you than you thought.
"I never catch colds," the village chief's friend said proudly. To which I say, I'd rather have a cold every day for the rest of my life than drink pee.
Needless to say, our glasses of tea didn't look so tempting after that.
5 comments:
"junk food of the week" ?
Ha! Brilliant, I wish I'd done it.
Excellent and Funny and Insightfull and all .. but for some reason all I can think of is Susu and how she's doing! (And judging by the number of responses on that post, I'm certain I'm not alone). Update please!
Hoah, that is new for me! Not the drinking part, but the source. From the US? So, do you think they fooled us? :-)
FYI, this urine drinking was written also some years ago in INTISARI magazine (Indonesian version of "Reader's digest", belongs to Gramedia group) and sparked a bit flows of protest from Islamic scholars since urine considered 'najis' (dirty thing) even to touch, and Intisari seemed to promote this!
I heard somewhere that Gandhi drank his own urine for some sort of health reasons, too...
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