“Earthly Materials: Journeys Through Our Bodies’ Emissions, Excretions, and Disintegrations” by Cutter Wood
c.2025 / Mariner / $29.99 / 362 pages
Oh, what a mess!
Quick, grab a broom and get to work. There’s dirt here and, ugh, something liquid spilled everywhere. Careful you don’t track it around or you’ll just make it worse. Seems like you’re the source of the mess, and in the new book “Earthly Materials” by Cutter Wood, it’s unpleasant but totally normal.
Take a peek in any anatomy schoolbook, and what you’ll see isn’t quite real.
The textbooks, said Wood, make the human body look neat, compartmentalized, and fresh. In the drawings, everything’s in its place. The truth, he says, is much messier.
Humans leak. They shed. They lose solids and liquids that are no longer needed to keep the body moving, working, or nourished — but stop leaking, “Stop urinating, stop defecating, stop breathing, and death is near.”
“Things,” he said, for instance, “are always going up your nose.” You need the gallon of mucus your body produces daily to save you from airborne bacteria you don’t want. Conversely, saliva, as he learned while donating spit in Massachusetts, keeps good bacteria in.
In ancient times, urine was a diagnostic tool used to determine the state of one’s health. The blood you donate, he says, is often sold to a third party before it’s used — or it runs the risk of not being used at all. Different species of mammals can have differently-shaped spermatozoa, and their milk-producing organs are mostly unique, too. The product of menses, he said, is not just the lining of the uterus; it’s actually “an entirely new organ.” One of the world’s oldest jokes was a flatulence quip written in ancient Sumeria, long before the birth of Christ. It’s possible — but very difficult — to collect someone’s last breath. The world’s oldest Neanderthal coprolite was left fifty thousand years ago in Spain. Your hair grows fastest in the springtime. And, as Wood learned at a retreat in Florida, “the causes of emesis… are as varied as they are vast” and can include psychedelic drugs.
Grossed out yet? Don’t be. You may not want to talk about bodily emissions, but that doesn’t mean they’re not necessary. And it doesn’t mean you can’t read “Earthly Materials” and learn something interesting.
Indeed, there are awe-inspiring facts on nearly every page of author Cutter Wood’s narrative and quite often, it’s hard not to laugh. Wood used himself as a guinea pig to report about the things we leave behind, and his discoveries about his own body are appealing because they’re totally relatable, true, but sometimes also bizarre. Most fun: there’s a sense of wonder in the bodily-function facts that begs not to be taken too seriously, and Woods’ nonsense-no-nonsense tone winks at readers throughout. It’s a journey of absurdities, but also cheeky reverence.
That all makes a book filled with interesting things that you’ll have a hard time not sharing. Really.
If you enjoy biology, science, culture, or can appreciate the awesomeness of you, you’ll love that this book is fascinating, unsophomoric and fun. Start “Earthly Materials,” and you’ll be swept up by it.
