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Urban Death Project Aims To Rebuild Our Soil By Composting Corpses (inhabitat.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The Urban Death Project utilizes the process of composting to safely and gently turn our deceased into soil-building material, creating a meaningful, equitable and ecological urban alternative to existing options for the disposition of the dead," said Katrina Spade, a designer based in Seattle. "The project is a solution to the overcrowding of city cemeteries, a sustainable method of disposing of our dead, and a new ritual for laying our loved ones to rest."
I have always said this is the way I want to be buried. No embalming and no coffin. Just bury me in dirt and let the bugs have at me. I have looked in to it and it's actually a very difficult thing to do in most places because it's illegal to be buried this way.
Sky burial has been practiced in Tibet for millennia.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
I already did my part. This is exactly how I disposed of my mother-in-law's corpse.
Why do you care what happens to your body after you die? You will be log gone by then.
isn't that a good name for a band?
Soylent Brown
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
And mix the ashes with a tad of soil and use that to plant a tree in a vase, when the tree grows a little, transplant it to ground.
But DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES compost me!
PS: In reality, my ashes will be thrown at sea. BUT DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES compost me!
Cannot imagine whay that would bother you. Composting will certainly give back to the earth and to future generations.
I have to note that I wanted cremated and flushed down the toilet at either a stripper bar or McDonald's. But this could be interesting. I'm envisioning my corpse being fed to one of those instant grinders like they use for rooster chicks (since only the hens lay eggs, and it's about a 50:50 mix at birth, so you do the math - then turning me into a nice compost for flowers or veggies.
Would vegans refuse to eat veggies grown from human content compost?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Soylent brown . . . is. pee-puhl!
Dead bodies are buried under the cherry trees. -- Motojirou Kajii.
I imagine a field where they recycle our flesh filled with bright red cherry trees in full bloom.
I'm thinking composting me would result in a lot of toxins and heavy metals being added to the soil...
> log gone
Hee hee, plant a tree, die, log gone, I see what you did there
The person in charge of me and my stuff when I'm gone knows 1 thing: as long as I'm dead I don't care what you do with me. Cremate me, bury me, donate me to science, chop me in pieces and toss me in the trash, I don't care. Just make sure I'm dead first.
Just use a wood chipper to take care of the problem. I know it works cause I saw it on TV.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
I just finished reading The Martian. Haven't seen the movie yet. It worked for him.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
Most of them are currently breathing. I think this way they would be much more useful.
Why is Snark Required?
Would vegans refuse to eat veggies grown from human content compost?
Just tell them it's soylent green.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
We used to use it as lawn fertilizer in Michigan from a product called Milorganite produced buy the Milwaukee sewer system.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
I read the headline as:
"Urban Death Project Aims To Rebuild Our Soil By Composting Congress"
And thought, "What an amazingly good idea!"
Would vegans refuse to eat veggies grown from human content compost?
Just tell them it's soylent green.
But I gave up soy for Lent.
Ugh..I apologize, I've wanted to uses that combination of words forever.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I mean, whatever you and your family want to do with your body is fine with me, but this is just idiotic from an environmental perspective. The environmental value of your body's chemical components is totally negligible compared to what you consume over your lifetime. I mean, I eat my weight's worth of food in a few months, so returning my body's nitrogen to the farmland is almost worthless. My share of fossil fuel burning is about 17 tonnes of carbon per year, so cremating the couple of kilograms of carbon I contain makes no difference.
The only real environmental problem with burial is that it ties up valuable urban land in a cemetery forever. Which is definitely an issue, but it's easy to solve: just get yourself cremated. This composting thing is expensive, unsafe, and a waste of time.
With the number of pills taken by the elderly these days, not to mention people who die in the hospital who may have all sorts of compounds pumped into them before they die, I wonder if the composting process fully breaks them down, or at least to safe levels. I didn't see any mention of it in TFA.
You don't use science to show that you're right, you use science to become right.
"You tell everybody. Listen to me, Hatcher. You've gotta tell them! Soylent Green is people! We've gotta stop them somehow!"
in cemetery - happy trees there.
With this project though - the fact how bones are handled is totally left out. They sure won't compose any time soon.
For composting, skull needs to be cracked open, bones ground up and soft body parts chopped into small pieces, like 2" dia, otherwise no composting, gets into stinky anaerobic process. A body, maybe 180 lbs > 60 % water, very challenging to compost, needs tons of carbon (wood) to compensate.
In recycling organic waste, let's say from restaurants or supermarkets, the major problem to get this material composted is to offset the water content with wood.
If reality kicks in with composting human bodies and gets public, people will be getting upset.
Looks like a very loony project - scamming airheads.
Vegetable gardening and fishing are my top two hobbies. There's a cyclical symbiosis there, if you look for it: you can eat the fish, bury its remains in your garden, grow vegetables supplemented by that fertilizer, and then use some of those vegetables (corn kernels) to catch more fish. This is nature. At a fundamental level, what difference does it make whether it's a fish carcass or my own rotting in a compost pile? None, really, so I get where the Urban Death Project is coming from. All of us carbon-based life forms will biodegrade, some of us just break down more slowly than others. It's a matter of scale.
I'm not going to donate my future self to this project, but I understand where they're coming from. I get it. Ultimately, each one of us is just another pile of biodegradable slop. Would I accept fertilizing my vegetables with human remains? No, I don't think I could handle that. I hope humanity doesn't reach a point where that becomes a viable option.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
Medication is a huge issue when it comes to human waste. Lots and lots and lots of the drugs we take pass nasty by products into our waste that aren't easily removed. So one of the challenges around waste treatment plants is the disposal of the solid/sludge component. It isn't something that you could use as fertilizer without health impacts.
This is something like what my wife and I have planned.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Because the idea of someone tending and revering the rotting meat sack like it's a sacred artifact is kinds of creepy. Embalming it so you can pretend it's not dead is even creepier.
I sure would (OK, I'm a vegetarian), for the same reason I don't agree with using human waste as compost ... humans are dirty, carry plenty of disease, and a modern human is mostly processed crap.
Which means I assume there's a lot of pathogens and other things which would come into play which we haven't yet established as safe ... Hep C and decades of pharmaceuticals, heavy metals, McDonald's, KFC, Viagra, and whatever other crap we dump into our bodies come to mind.
I seriously doubt humans are fit for consumption by anything, let alone humans.
Hell, the animals we grow for the purpose of eating aren't fit to eat in my opinion; the nasty disgusting carcass of a modern human? The mind reels at just how nasty that must be.
Really, would you eat medical waste? Because that's what you're talking about.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Have gnu, will travel.
And to dirt you shall return.
Humans are the top of the food chain. When you think about eating fish from Lake Erie.... Eating human flesh is much much worse. We're so full of toxins by the time we reach old age.
They could call it soil-lent green? It really is made from people, and grows green plants.
Website Just Down For Me? Find out
I've already made my preferences known to my family:
"Get six jolly cowboys to carry my coffin.
Six dance-hall maidens to bear up my pall.
Throw bunches of roses all over my coffin.
Roses to deaden the clods as they fall."
Then beat the drum slowly, play the Fife lowly.
Play the dead march as you carry me along.
Take me to the green valley, lay the sod o'er me,
I'm a young cowboy and I know I've done wrong."
You are welcome on my lawn.
Sure it is. It just needs to be composted for 2-3 years for the bacteria in it to heat up and die off. People have been using it for thousands of years. Mix it with other stuff like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and you'll end up creating some good soil.
At what point is it OK to eat anything, then? There's going to be some form of human and other animal residue in any soil that's cultivated for food crops. It might be the farmer dropping a deuce out in the paddock because he/she couldn't be bothered going back to the farmhouse, miles away. It could be skin flakes and sweat, it could be bird droppings, a decomposing snake or rat. I'm not dissing your beliefs, I would really like to know where you draw the line.
Although there's bound to be some accumulated heavy metals and other toxins (for want of a better word) in a human corpse, there's also bucketloads of nutrients. This is a worthwhile experiment, and I'm keen to see the results.
P.S. humans are fit for consumption by lots of things, from bacteria, through worms, all the way up to sharks and crocodiles.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
Because the idea of someone tending and revering the rotting meat sack like it's a sacred artifact is kinds of creepy.
Hard to imagine that you'd intentionally rot something is treating it as a sacred artifact. The crap in that article about teh loving family wrapping the sorpse in linen is just some goofy crap about people that might find it off-putting.
There isn't anything at all unnatural about the decomposition process.
Would vegans refuse to eat veggies grown from human content compost?
I sure would (OK, I'm a vegetarian), for the same reason
So how do you keep animal corpse byproducts out of the food you eat? Or do you just eat hydroponically grown veggies?
I don't agree with using human waste as compost ...
That's good, because it isn't compost. You might use it as a fertilizer for it. But compost is broken down organic products, not manure. Manure might be added to compost.
humans are dirty, carry plenty of disease, and a modern human is mostly processed crap.
No more so than any other flesh based component of compost. By the time it has been broken down it isn't a human, or any other animal.
Which means I assume there's a lot of pathogens and other things which would come into play which we haven't yet established as safe ... Hep C and decades of pharmaceuticals, heavy metals, McDonald's, KFC, Viagra, and whatever other crap we dump into our bodies come to mind.
Have you ever tried Breatharianism? Migh tjust be about pure enough.
I seriously doubt humans are fit for consumption by anything, let alone humans.
Hell, the animals we grow for the purpose of eating aren't fit to eat in my opinion; the nasty disgusting carcass of a modern human? The mind reels at just how nasty that must be.
Really, would you eat medical waste? Because that's what you're talking about.
Okay, I thought I had a rather cynical view of humanity, but your hatred of the species is nothing I could ever aspire to. Gopod luck with that.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
IT'S PEOPLE! IT'S MADE OF PEOPLE!
Like I said, obligatory. But, as has been noted, it's hardly a radical thought- chances are that, no matter where you stand, there's a dead body buried beneath you. If that makes you uncomfortable, well, see if you can get up on the Cloud Ark or something.
-Z
You can feed me to the crows for all it matters.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Here's a thought - put the corpses through an industrial grinder to reduce them to slop, then dispose of the slop way out in the ocean.
Result? A reduction of atmospheric CO2 from algal blooms. Win-win, I say.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
You know why we have E-coli outbreaks? Because animal waste and other garbage contaminates food.
You know why we have things like "mad cow disease"? Because some idiot decided grinding up sheep to feed to cows made sense -- despite that cows are herbivores and not evolved to ingest sheep.
My father made his own garden compost for a lot of years, and quite frankly meat caused more problems than it contributed ... because the meat rotted and got nasty and didn't break down into nice clean compost. That's why we historically slop pigs with it, because they do a better job of turning it into something useful -- meat. I won't eat it, but I do know why we've had pigs in agriculture for thousands of years.
You'll notice we don't use the term "manure" to include the shit from carnivores, and people don't generally eat carnivores ... because it develops a really nasty flavor due to concentrating everything else in the food chain.
Look around at your average person you see in Wal Mart. Overweight, loaded up with sodium and other nasty chemicals, fat, grease, oil, medicines -- prepared food and other garbage.
If someone put half of that shit into cows, you wouldn't eat that. Well, increasingly we do put that shit into cows, and people are discovering it's unhealthy and quite the opposite of good for you. In fact, it contributes to makes use overall more sick.
A human from an abstract agrarian culture? Well, there's an "ick" factor, but it isn't quite so loaded with the crap modern humans put in.
If our waterways are full of hormones and antibiotics because we put it into our bodies and excrete it out, you can't claim that a human is fit for eating.
You can go ahead and eat whatever you want. I don't give a shit. But you'll notice nobody is looking to use dog crap as manure, or eating wolves ... precisely because, unlike eating cows and other herbivores, they're mostly a concentration of garbage which doesn't add any value to compost.
I don't hate humans. But I look at modern humans as anything but what I'd call a clean food source ... because modern life fills us with chemicals and other garbage the FDA wouldn't let you put into cows,
I sure as fuck wouldn't eat something which I knew had humans as compost, and if I had my option, I wouldn't want something which had ground up cows or cats or monkeys as compost either. Precisely because I know damned well there are diseases which can spread from this.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
How do you know?
It's a pretty good assumption. The odds are in favour of there not being some magic afterlife, on the grounds that there has been not one shred of evidence to suggest such a thing might exist.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
It's true that a small compost pile cannot handle meat, but industrial scale piles can because they generate much more heat, which also kills off the bacteria.
Green bin programs collect kitchen scraps including meat, fish and bones in addition to the usual vegetable matter. All of it is composted.
Actually you can compost meat just fine, it just needs to be processed differently than vegetable matter if you want to avoid the stench and potential disease issues. Though I think even normal composting will work if you're scrupulous enough about turning it regularly and keeping the temperature up.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Look up black soldier flies. They are common flies whose larvae are used for composting, and are very effective with all organics including meat wastes, usually much faster reduction than normal composting. The larvae themselves are protein rich and are great feed for chickens.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
As the book says, direct shit(human)-to-farm in a tight loop is a very bad idea on earth - bacteria and parasites that do well in (but not for) people are given an ideal transmission vector. An example disease is Amoebiasis (had it, not fun). It is very common in developing nations, where these kinds of farming practices are sometimes employed. But a composting toilet solves this. And good, modern ones can do so without any smells or unpleasantness.
I reckon Elon Musk/Tesla should do a composting toilet. It is the logical companion project to post-industrial-modernist home produced & stored electricity. The problem is, I guess, that Tesla's usual business model of capturing hearts and minds by going for the prestige end of the market first could be a bit tricky. Any ideas?
If it acquires resources on instantiation like a duck, then its a shared_ptr<Duck>
It would be cool if the algal blooms could form an image of the recently departed, when viewed form high above. Perhaps with a caption like: "I told you I was sick!"
If it acquires resources on instantiation like a duck, then its a shared_ptr<Duck>
http://www.academia.edu/375869...
The practice of Sky Burial was at one time, pretty common, from Anatolia to China
Even today, the Parsi people (whose ancestors came from Persia - currently known as Iran) in India still practice Sky Burial
http://www.treehugger.com/cult...
In Iran, "Towers of Silence" still exist, in remote places
http://www.slate.com/blogs/atl...
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Katrina Spade? Where did they dig her up from then, eh?
When I lived in town and also had room for a convenient compost pile, all food scraps that were deemed unsuitable to be fed to the dog were composted (aside from, perhaps, bulk used cooking oil).
This was done very indiscriminately. Vegetable matter, cooked meat, raw meat, bones, exoskeletons from shellfish: Whatever we didn't/wouldn't eat got composted. Paper plates and napkins, too.
The vegetable matter did its usual and unsurprising thing. The meat was either picked clean by scavengers if left uncovered, or if thinly buried would be quickly destroyed by maggots, or if more deeply buried it would turn into a haven for all kinds of creepy little earth-dwelling bugs.
One time there was a family of kittens living in, and consuming, the remains of a 38-pound turkey that was put there after Thanksgiving. They were feral, as was their mother, and they all seemed very healthy before they got big and wandered away.
In all cases, it would turn into good, rich compost. And I would use this compost in the vegetable garden, where I had excellent results despite having clay soil, with zero insect pest problems on the plants, zero pesticide, and minimal extra fertilizer (and that probably could have been replaced with more compost later and/or good cover crops earlier, given sufficient motivation).
It was a cold-ish compost pile, in that I didn't pay much attention to it other than to stir and chop it around with a sharp hoe every now and then. Sometimes in the spring I would drop some red worms from a bait shop in and they seemed to do quite well in there.
Prions seem to be the chief worry when it comes to composted meat, but meh. Worrying about prions (many of which are impossible to destroy with cooking) isn't my thing, since this all started with food that I had purchased myself for consumption by myself and my family.
The cherry tomatoes from that garden fed with meat-compost were the best I've ever had, and no, I didn't ever wash them before eating them by the handful.
That said: Composting modern people? Hmm. I might sign up for the end of my days, but I don't think I'll be using any human compost in my vegetable garden before then.
Kid-proof tablet..
Any small animal the cat killed we'd throw into the compost bin and the worms didn't seem to mind.
I think you should get out more.
"Environmentalism is the religion of choice for urban atheists" - Michael Crichton
viz. the song 'Look at them beans'.
How do you know?
Does it really matter? With or without an afterlife, once the brain is dead you are no longer in that body. Funerals and corps preserving are for the living, the dead are dead, and no longer care. I say let body decompose and return to the earth, just like every other living thing.
--- Keep the choice with the user..
Can somebody (or some body) explain why this is "equitable"?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Izzi: Remember Moses Morales?
Tom Creo: Who?
Izzi: The Mayan guide I told you about.
Tom Creo: From your trip.
Izzi: Yeah. The last night I was with him, he told me about his father, who had died. Well Moses wouldn't believe it.
Tom Creo: Izzi...
Izzi: [embraces Tom] No, no. Listen, listen. He said that if they dug his father's body up, it would be gone. They planted a seed over his grave. The seed became a tree. Moses said his father became a part of that tree. He grew into the wood, into the bloom. And when a sparrow ate the tree's fruit, his father flew with the birds. He said... death was his father's road to awe. That's what he called it. The road to awe. Now, I've been trying to write the last chapter and I haven't been able to get that out of my head!
Tom Creo: Why are you telling me this?
Izzi: I'm not afraid anymore, Tommy.
Quoted from the movie, The Fountain.
Why not feed corpses into a mincer and then plough them into a field?
We just need to tether dead bodies to buoys out around the coastline to feed the sharks.
Should help cut down on the 15 or so shark attacks we have every year. /s
Have you ever fallen asleep at the keybhanusdiog?
Would vegans refuse to eat veggies grown from human content compost?
They already eat food fertilized with animal waste and keep carnivores as pets. Don't necessarily look for consistency.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I am fairly sure Toxic Dumping is against the law.
You know why we have E-coli outbreaks? Because animal waste and other garbage contaminates food.
No shit? That's a joke son. One thing is pretty simple. Clean the food. Cook the food.
Here's a story that will make you cringe. My Grandmother raised 8 healthy strapping children during the great depression. Shae was an incredible gardener. Her secret? manure tea.
She kept chickens as well. Scooped up the manure and put it in a barrel that colleccted rainwater off one of the sheds. Every so often, she'd dip an old saucepan in the water and give the plants a little drink of chickenshit tea. Not a lot you see, chicken manure is a very powerful fertilizer and too much can kill the plant. The tea helped dilute it, but you still had to be careful.
I ate a lot of her veggies when I was little. They were completely clean, well washed, and nicely cooked. 100 percent organic.
That's another weird thing. My family was organic foodies long before it was popular.
You know why we have things like "mad cow disease"? Because some idiot decided grinding up sheep to feed to cows made sense -- despite that cows are herbivores and not evolved to ingest sheep.
On that, I agree. Corporate husbandry has done even worse stuff than that. Newspapers and shit as a food source with massive doese of antibiotics. Fucking sickening.
My father made his own garden compost for a lot of years, and quite frankly meat caused more problems than it contributed ... because the meat rotted and got nasty and didn't break down into nice clean compost.
It pretty much needs a different process. I compost mostly with old leaves - mulch 'em up and let them sit for a few years or so. If there is a heaven, it smells like my leaf compost.
Look around at your average person you see in Wal Mart. Overweight, loaded up with sodium and other nasty chemicals, fat, grease, oil, medicines -- prepared food and other garbage.
Geeze man, take a deep breath or two.
If our waterways are full of hormones and antibiotics because we put it into our bodies and excrete it out, you can't claim that a human is fit for eating.
But we have used what we used, and our bodies have excreted the rest. Most of what you cite is a problem and one I agree with. I just want to fix the problem, and excreted meds are a problem as more and more people go on maintenance drugs. Its not an intractable problem.
You can go ahead and eat whatever you want. I don't give a shit.
Thank you!
But you'll notice nobody is looking to use dog crap as manure, or eating wolves
Side note: apparently while edible, never eat the liver of a frank or almost exclusively carnivore. Their livers have an intense concentration of vitamin A, which can lead to problems.
I sure as fuck wouldn't eat something which I knew had humans as compost, and if I had my option, I wouldn't want something which had ground up cows or cats or monkeys as compost either. Precisely because I know damned well there are diseases which can spread from this.
At what level of separation do you hold previously deteriorated meat acceptable? After a turkey vulture eats an animal and shits it out? There is a cycle of composition/decomposition going on, and it has been for a long time. There might be some molecules of Alexander the Great's piss, or even Jeffrey Dahmer's for that matter, in the Evian you drank this morning. It isn't something we can get away from.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I don't believe in an 'afterlife' or 'gods' or any of that nonsense so as far as I'm concerned once I'm dead (and you'd better be damned sure I'm completely dead first!) so far as I'm concerned you can put me through a woodchipper or a giant Blendtec blender on 'Liquify' for all I care.
The real problem with an idea like this is all the religious types. Some of them will literally become homicidal over something like this because of their beliefs. Since we can't seem to shake off the whole 'religion' thing to start with, that makes an idea like this a total non-starter. Meanwhile I guess they can encourage cremation.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
If there is no afterlife, then I'm gone when I'm dead, and my only concern is to make sure my family is well off without me.
If there is an afterlife, and I either hang around as a spirit or reincarnate or something, what use do I have for my current body any more? I'm not that sentimental, and I can see no real spiritual use for it.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Like this urge I have to sometime shout "Theater" in a crowded fire? I'm not likely to get the opportunity, and really don't want it, but if I'm ever in one....
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Would vegans refuse to eat veggies grown from human content compost?
They already eat food fertilized with animal waste and keep carnivores as pets. Don't necessarily look for consistency.
Exactly. Consistency is always teh problem of philosophical Vegetarianism, and especially veganism.
The furter one goes into teh world of "If you eat this, you are not a good person, the whackier it gets.
I've said it before, in my estimation, all life is precious, from bacteria to yeast to plants and animals. Not a one of us has managed to survive without killing something. Plants are living organisms, and vegetarians and vegans kill them without a second thought.
Even the ne plus ultra of the "I am better than you because I don't eat ( fill in the blank)" the breatharians, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... , in addition to soon dying after truly engaging in their superiority over others and not party tricks, their immune systems have merrily been killing other life forms until they shift this mortal coil
Perhaps some day we will become chemoautotrophs, but I'm not holding my breath.
I've given thought to this, and since it is a fact of life that none of us live, I sort of follow the American Indian example of mentally thanking the being or thing that gave it's life so that I could continue mine.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Given the rate that soil is being lost with modern farming techniques even composting every person that dies wouldn't replace all of the soil lost.
Like this urge I have to sometime shout "Theater" in a crowded fire? I'm not likely to get the opportunity, and really don't want it, but if I'm ever in one....
Like I was at a big fight, and a Hockey game broke out.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Composting is an aerobic decomposition process that generates enough heat to kill all pathogenic bacteria. Read any good book about composting (or even a decent pamphlet) and that is the most important thing you will learn. So, by definition, composting human remains leaves no viable pathogens. Bodies dug up in cemeteries are unsanitary because they decomposed anaerobically, at low temperatures. It is almost as if cemeteries were designed to be unsafe.
It never ceases to amaze me, just how well-rounded Slashdotters, in general, are not. Push back from your computers and go do something outside every once in a while. Grow a garden. Build a shed. Clean a stream. Something.
Keeping them out of the food chain is probably a very good idea.