Rose George > Quotes

“This is why the Liberian waiter laughed at me. He thought that I thought a toilet was my right, when he knew it was a privilege.
"It must be, when 2.6 billion people don't have sanitation. I don't mean that they have no toilet in their house and must use a public one with queues and fees. Or that they have an outhouse, or a ricety shack that empties into a filthy drain or pigsty. All that counts as sanitation, though not a safe variety. The people who have those are the fortunate ones. Four in ten people have no access to any latrine, toilet, bucket, or box. Nothing. Instead, they defecate by train tracks and in forests. They do it in plastic bags and fling them through the air in narrow slum alleyways. If they are women, they get up at 4 A.M. to be able to do their business under cover of darkness for reasons of modesty, risking rape and snakebites. Four in ten people live in situations where they are surrounded by human excrement because it is in the bushes outside the village or in their city yards, left by children outside the backdoor. It is tramped back in on their feet, carried on fingers onto clothes, food and drinking water.
"The disease toll of this is stunning. A gram of feces can contain 10 million viruses, 1 million bacteria, 1,000 parasite cysts, and 100 worm eggs...”
― Rose George, The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters

“Shipping is so cheap that it makes more financial sense for Scottish cod to be sent ten thousand miles to China to be filleted, then sent back to Scottish shops and restaurants, than to pay Scottish filleters. A Scottish newspaper called this practice “madness,” but actually it’s just shipping.”
― Rose George, Ninety Percent of Everything: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry That Puts Clothes on Your Back, Gas in Your Car, and Food on Your Plate

“Each year, a shipping publicist told me, 'More oil is poured down the drain by mechanics changing their engine oil than is spilled by the world's fleet of oil tankers.”
― Rose George, Ninety Percent of Everything: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry That Puts Clothes on Your Back, Gas in Your Car, and Food on Your Plate

“It drips on her head most days, says Champaben, but in the monsoon season it's worse. In rain, worms multiply. Every day, nonetheless, she gets up and walks to her owners' house, and there she picks up their excrement with her bare hands or a piece of tin, scrapes it into a basket, puts the basket on her head or shoulders, and carries it to the nearest waste dump. She has no mask, no gloves, and no protection. She is paid a pittance if she gets paid at all. She regularly gets dysentary, giardia, brain fever. She does this because a 3,000-year-old social hierarchy says she has to.”
― Rose George, The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters

“Mr. Wang had found my interest in fen, the Mandarin word for excrement, peculiar. Nonetheless, he tried to be helpful. He would point out when he spotted a truck full of fen looming behind, though its odor preceded it by far. He would alert me when he saw a tiny figure in a roadside field bearing a tank and hose, spraying--by the smell of it--the contents of his toilets on his cabbages. This practice would horrify any public health professional, given the disease-load of feces, but it's what happens to 90 percent of China's excrement, and has been done forever. There are reasons not to eat salads in China, and why the sizzling woks are so sizzling.”
― Rose George, The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters

“the more ships have grown in size and consequence, the less space they take up in our imagination.”
― Rose George, Ninety Percent of Everything: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry That Puts Clothes on Your Back, Gas in Your Car, and Food on Your Plate

“The 1.8 million child deaths each year related to clean water and sanitation dwarf the casualities associated with violent conflict. No act of terrorism generates economic devastation on the scale of the crisis in water and sanitation. Yet the issue barely registers on the international agenda.”
― rose george

“If the cultural standing of excrement doesn't convince them, I say that the material itself is as rich as oil and probably more useful. It contains nitrogen and phosphates that can make plants grow and also suck the life from water because its nutrients absorb available oxygen. It can be both food and poison. It can contaminate and cultivate. Millions of people cook with gas made by fermenting it. I tell them that I don't like to call it "waste," when it can be turned into bricks, when it can make roads or jewelry, and when in a dried powdered form known as poudrette it was sniffed like snuff by the grandest ladies of the eighteenth-century French court. Medical men of not too long ago thought stool examination a vital diagnostic tool (London's Wellcome Library holds a 150-year0old engraving of a doctor examining a bedpan and a sarcastic maid asking him if he'd like a fork). They were also fond of prescribing it: excrement could be eaten, drunk, or liberally applied to the skin. Martin Luther was convinced: he reportedly ate a spoonful of his own excrement daily and wrote that he couldn't understand the generosity of a God who freely gave such important and useful remedies.”
― Rose George, The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters

“Asking how astronauts go to the bathroom is one of the most common questions put during NASA or space museum outreach sessions. To cope with the curiosity, for a while the agency posted a video that featured a fully-clothed volunteer showing exactly how it was done: with a mirror, sometimes. Young is often asked about it. "Interest from the public is strange. Women don't care. They think, they worked it out and that's that. Men have an almost unhealthy interest. Children are interested in the poop factor." What everybody should actually be interested in is the drinking pee factor.”
― Rose George, The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters

“I like that Maersk is a first name. It's like a massive global corporation named Derek.”
― Rose George, Ninety Percent of Everything: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry That Puts Clothes on Your Back, Gas in Your Car, and Food on Your Plate

“long. Trade has always traveled and the world has always traded. Ours, though, is the era of extreme interdependence. Hardly any nation is now self-sufficient. In 2011, the United Kingdom shipped in half of its gas. The United States relies on ships to bring in two-thirds of its oil supplies. Every day, thirty-eight million tons of crude oil sets off by sea somewhere, although you may not notice it. As in Los Angeles, New York, and other port cities, London has moved its working docks out of the city, away from residents. Ships are bigger now and need deeper harbors, so they call at Newark or Tilbury or Felixstowe, not Liverpool or South Street.”
― Rose George, Ninety Percent of Everything: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry That Puts Clothes on Your Back, Gas in Your Car, and Food on Your Plate

“When MSC Napoli grounded off a Devon beach in January 2007, its burst boxes of motorbikes, shampoo, and diapers attracted looters and treasure hunters. It was also a rare opportunity to compare what was declared on container manifests with actual contents. In 20 percent of the containers, the contents and weights were wrong.”
― Rose George, Ninety Percent of Everything: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry That Puts Clothes on Your Back, Gas in Your Car, and Food on Your Plate

“Of all the peoples of the world, the Chinese are probably the most at home with their excrement.”
― Rose George, The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters

“Only forest fires produce more black carbon than bunker fuel. Bunker fuel can have a sulfur content of up to 45,000 parts per million (ppm). Low-sulfur diesel for cars is supposed to contain 10 ppm. The sulfur is converted into acid”
― Rose George, Ninety Percent of Everything: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry That Puts Clothes on Your Back, Gas in Your Car, and Food on Your Plate

“The right way to do any social work is to work until you're not needed anymore.”
― Rose George, The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters

“There are no voice pipes or telegraphs, as Titanic had, and barely any brass, but so many beeps and screens that I wonder if ships will soon be able to drive themselves.”
― Rose George, Ninety Percent of Everything: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry That Puts Clothes on Your Back, Gas in Your Car, and Food on Your Plate

“The ship needs constant care, an 80,000-ton toddler.”
― Rose George, Ninety Percent of Everything: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry That Puts Clothes on Your Back, Gas in Your Car, and Food on Your Plate

“In The Box, a history of the container, the economist Marc Levinson describes a 1954 voyage on a typical cargo ship, SS Warrior. It carried 74,903 cases, 71,726 cartons, 24,036 bags, 10,671 boxes, 2,880 bundles, 2,877 packages, 2,634 pieces, 1,538 drums, 888 cans, 815 barrels, 53 wheeled vehicles, 21 crates, 10 transporters, 5 reels, and 1,525 undetermined items. A total of 194,582 pieces, all of which had to be loaded and unloaded by hand. The total weight came to just over five thousand tons of cargo and would have taken weeks to move. Kendal can unload and load several thousand boxes in less than twenty-four hours.”
― Rose George, Ninety Percent of Everything: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry That Puts Clothes on Your Back, Gas in Your Car, and Food on Your Plate

“India’s Supreme Court banned the sale of blood in 1996.43 It has also banned untouchability. Both bans are equally flexibly interpreted and both banned activities flourish happily. In 2008, for example, police acting on a tip-off raided a series of squalid tin sheds near Gorakhpur, Madhya Pradesh, and found blood slaves.44 As Scott Carney reported in The Red Market, poor migrant men were kept in sheds by a local dairy farmer, Pappu Yadhav, and persistently bled to the point of death. Police found five sheds and freed seventeen men, who had been bled twice a week. Some had been imprisoned for two and a half years. Hemoglobin levels in a normal adult male should be 14 to 18 grams per deciliter of blood. The blood slaves had 4 grams.”
― Rose George, Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Money, Medicine, and Mysteries of Blood

“The fact that O-type people are more susceptible to cholera was first noticed in 1977. During Peru’s 1991 epidemic, people with O blood were eight times more likely to be hospitalized.20 People from the Ganges delta, where cholera has always been endemic, have the lowest rate of O type anywhere.”
― Rose George, Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Money, Medicine, and Mysteries of Blood

“She squints into the distance, this young woman who looks strong but who statistics say is still too vulnerable to violence and abuse and infection. I want her to triumph because she deserves to. I know that countless people are working ferociously to find cures, solutions, innovations, outreach, to marshal every weapon against HIV. I know all that and try to remember it. But I also know the numbers. So I see this young black woman looking into the distance, and I see her seeing that HIV is coming. It is still coming despite our best efforts and it is coming for her.”
― Rose George, Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Money, Medicine, and Mysteries of Blood

“White blood cells are removed from all donations—a process called leukodepletion—because it is in white cells that many infections travel, including the prions that cause variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), a vile and violent affliction that anyone growing up in the 1980s will visualize as piles of burning cattle and skeletal humans who fall when they walk because their brains are degenerating.”
― Rose George, Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Money, Medicine, and Mysteries of Blood

“But already blood is a surveillance camera, the widest window with the best view into my past, present, and predictable future. Blood is one of the three main diagnostic tools of a doctor: the others are imaging and a physical exam.”
― Rose George, Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Money, Medicine, and Mysteries of Blood

“Monks were supposed to be celibate, and chronic and enforced celibacy was thought to entail a dangerous buildup of semen (retentio semenis), which could lead to blood poisoning.21”
― Rose George, Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Money, Medicine, and Mysteries of Blood

“Scientists such as Jonathan Quick of the Harvard Medical School believe there will be another major outbreak of something – in our air, food, or blood – in the next fifty years.”
― Rose George, Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Mysterious, Miraculous World of Blood

“There is nothing like it. It is stardust and the sea. The iron in our blood comes from the death of supernovas, like all iron on our planet.5 This bright red liquid—brighter in the arteries, when it is transporting oxygen around the body from the heart, duller in the veins, when it is not—contains salt and water, like the sea we possibly came from.”
― Rose George, Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Money, Medicine, and Mysteries of Blood

“He asked the captain his usual questions: What can I do for you? Shall I take you shopping?" The captain said no, thank you, but he had another request. His crew would like to walk on grass. Green, green grass. "We have been ashore," said this captain, "but most of the time we walk on steel. It is unforgiving." The priest was not flummoxed. He put them in the center's van and drove them to a churchyard near Hull airport. "And they all took off their shoes and walked barefoot on the grass for an hour, then they went back to the ship.”
― Rose George, Ninety Percent of Everything: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry That Puts Clothes on Your Back, Gas in Your Car, and Food on Your Plate

“historical, political, social, biological, and moral aspects of blood”
― Rose George, Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Money, Medicine, and Mysteries of Blood