The last time I got the bill at a restaurant, I thought they were taking the urine, but not quite in the way that one restaurant at Melbourne’s Food & Wine festival will shortly be.
Hospitality Magazine reports on the initiative, brainchild of restaurateur Joost Bakker. Visitors to Bakker’s pop-up restaurant will find that this year it runs entirely off mustard seed oil, in keeping with Bakker’s sustainability leanings. Those who visit the smallest room in the restaurant (as it were) will have their urine “harvested” and used to fertilise soil in which the mustard seeds for future oil (and future pop-up restaurants) will be grown. The article quotes Bakker as saying that urine harvesting will be the way of the future
“I think in the future everyone will do it. I think in 15 or 20 years, everyone will be harvesting urine. Because at the moment one third of the world’s gas is used to create fertiliser for agriculture so it’s just not sustainable to do it that way, and yet we’ve got 7 billion people creating fertiliser every day of the week so it just makes sense to use it”.
I applaud the idea behind this, but am I the only one who gets slightly squeamish at the use of the word “harvested” when it comes to urine?
[Hospitality Magazine]
Image:codepo8