At an event for children earlier this year, there was a spirited game of bingo underway. The first boy to call out “Bingo!” received a lollipop. He proclaimed, “I got poop!” which I thought was disgusting but perhaps understandable given the age group. If you spend time with certain boys between the ages of 5 and 8, you will quickly learn that potty humor knows no bounds. Elsa’s “Frozen” song, the potty edition, is truly a work of art for the bathroom joke aficionado (“Let it go! / Let the toilets overflow!”). Poop lollipop? Nothing to look twice at when spoken by a little boy.
Until, horror of horrors, my own child received a lollipop, saturated with food dye, in the shape of a “poop emoji.” For those unfamiliar, the poop emoji (Wikipedia informs us, known informally as the “poomoji,” as if anything could be more informal than a smiling crap cartoon) is a cheerful cartoon face atop a pile of feces. The lollipops were in the shape of a pile of iridescent, Valentine-red poop.
With everything else happening, I did not absorb the enormity of this fact at first. A piece of some child’s monstrous treat broke off and landed on the laces of my white shoes. For the days following, a smudge of sticky red attracted dirt and haunted me.
It wasn’t until a few weeks later when I mentioned to someone that my kids received Valentine poop lollipops, a statement that required some explanation for someone who has not been immersed in current kid culture, that I faced the disquiet. Explaining it was uncomfortable. Have we really stooped to feeding our children crap?
So it would seem. People might want to object that it wasn’t actually the byproducts of mammalian digestion. It’s a joke! Humor is, after all, the pairing of seemingly incongruous entities: poop and food, what a laugh! That is, as I have argued elsewhere, true enough, but we should be loathe to reduce humor to the most base, especially around children. It’s vile.
Then there is the question of ingesting humor in this case. We used to say, “You are what you eat.” But we have so changed the systems of food production and consumption in regrettable ways that we want to say that it’s not really true. Isn’t it, though? At a cellular level, your body is composed of the food that you eat and digest. We are, literally, what we eat.
In an age of idolatry and obsessive food purity, I return often to Jesus’s words in the Gospel of Matthew: “It is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of the mouth; this defiles a person” (15:11).
What determines what comes out of our mouths? The thoughts we think. What we see, read, observe, hear—all these inputs give us the raw material with which we express who we are and what we love, the substance of our being, body and soul. Aside from the noxious food dyes and high fructose corn syrup overload, we should be prepared to admit that we are feeding our children junk. The cartoon dad in “Bluey” seems like a titan of heroic virtue until you compare him to a real man. If this is the best we have to offer, excellence has gone missing.
What has the world come to when in all the beauty of creation we reach for manufactured piles of poop to feed our hungry children?
