Having grown a beard for five months recently (though I shaved it down to a gotif last week), I have picked up the habit of, well, how do I say this? Pushing any upper-lip whiskers long enough to reach into my mouth an snipping them of with my teeth. A beard trimmer on the go; and it keeps things remarkably even. The hitch is that since my fingers are near my mouth a lot to perform this nibble-trim, I can just as easily nibble-trim my nails. I used to be a very bad nail-biter (fingernails, I mean). I've gotten a lot more sanitary and less jittery for such behavior; but I still sometimes chip away at them absentmindedly. What's more, I admit there's a peculiar satisfaction in redigesting proteins that your body has processed and produced in nail- and hair-form. Waste not, want not, I say! (By the way, a hair sample is the longest lasting method of drug testing, since drug traces end up in follicles and then grow all the way up into hairs. It's impossible to bleach, wash, or dislodge the traces as long as the hair is intact.)
Finally -- full disclosure -- I must admit the hair-and-nail gourmet has a side dish: skin. Cuticles, molting calluses, etc. all cry out for some fine dental manicuring. So nibble I do. It's probably a habit I developed in response to my painful history of ingrown toenails, based on which I learned the Number One Maxim of nail care: Keep the Skin Below the Nail Edge, Otherwise the Nail Edge Below the Skin Will Burrow Into the Skin! self-grooming is a noble primate tradition, right?
So there you have it: whiskers, nails and skin, all an undeniable part of my diet. All this nibble-trimming and nail-chipping got me wondering, and then to blogging...
INSCITIA:
How long could you survive on a diet of nails, hairs and epidermal skin? What's the caloric value of such homegrown snacks?
COGITATIO:
The key is the growth rate for all these appendages. You'd have to pace your consumption to maintain a steady level of nails and hair. Maybe you could favor alternating hands every day or two. Maybe you could have a "scalp-hair feast" every few days, between which you'd sate yourself on knuckle, arm and leg hair. (And we can't forget eyebrows, eyelashes, any torso- and ear-hairs.) Meanwhile, you'd have to scrape all dead skin flakes, and even decent little bits of callused skin, off your arms and back for in-between nutrition. I think skin-cell loss would be reliable and frequent than hair- and nail-growth, so it would be your staple. I would "allow" for basic water intake (which would in turn produce some nice electrolyte-0rsih sweat to wash down whiskers al la nail).
Considering all these parameters, and how long an average human can live on total food fasting, I give this diet at least a solid two months. Consider it a radically Emersonian Akins Diet.
The slogan? "Eat at Toes!"
RESPONSUM:
2 comments:
Dude, I do the exact same thing with my beard, cuticles, calluses, etc.
Nails I can't help you with. I used to be a terrible nail-biter, too, but then stopped one year when I made an agreement with a student that I would stop biting my nails if she would stop saying "like" so often. She never bothered to keep her end of the deal, but I, mysteriously, did and have no idea why/how I did.
How long could you survive on a diet of nails, hairs and epidermal skin? What's the caloric value of such homegrown snacks?
I can't imagine the caloric value is very high, but inasmuch as you are consuming only one particular kind of body part, I doubt you're going to be getting all your nutritional needs met. You might have to start gnawing on a leg, too. Hmm, you would think a human body would have every type of nutrient that a human body needs. Could you take advantage of all of that, or would cooking inevitably render some of the vitamins unusable? Would you have to eat yourself raw?
P.S. I avoid telling females about my proclivities in this area.
Jon W:
Thanks for the words. You, obviously, have tact vis a vis the ladies. I, on the other hand, have a blog! I think a little gnawing would be in order. Surely drawing blood up into slight wound (and then scab) would be a nice supplement. There are other nutirient *ahem* "options", I realize, but I shan't discuss them, even here on my embarass-myself blog. *Ahem.*
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