I was in the local store this morning when I noticed a new box of dirt packages on the counter. They sell it to the local "Democrats" for eating.
Have seen it done by some all my life but thought I'd study the practice a little. Don't think I'll be trying it any time soon.
Here's about all I can find:
Sweet Loam Alabama
For a small percentage of Americans, soil isn’t just the medium for growing food; it’s a meal in itself. Arguably, only cultural chance has kept dirt-eating, or geophagia, from becoming more widespread. If your great-grandmother is Swedish, Japanese, Finnish, Javan, Peruvian, Mayan, or West African, she may have once heard of a good recipe for a soup or bread that featured soil as an ingredient. Religious traditions involving the ingesting of dirt span the globe. Slaves brought to the Americas from African nations continued their native practice of eating soils, and the habit was common among women during pregnancy. In some rural communities in this country, the practice still exists.
People who eat dirt are sometimes nutrient-deficient—low levels of calcium or iron, for example, can cause a person to crave chalky substances such as clay. What human bodies can extract from dirt, though, is debatable: Many of the soils that are regularly eaten are dominated by a ferrous-oxide form of iron, which is poorly absorbed by the body. But by and large, many geophages, when asked why they do it, say they simply enjoy the taste.
Geophagia is often classified as the psychiatric disease pica—the ingesting or mouthing of nonnutritive substances, which can range from soils to cigarette butts to soaps and rubber gloves. Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s character Rebecca experienced a geophagic episode as the result of love-crazed madness in One Hundred Years of Solitude: “Rebecca got up in the middle of the night and ate handfuls of earth in the garden with a suicidal drive, weeping with pain and fury, chewing tender earthworms and chipping her teeth on snail shells.”
Dirt-eaters don’t generally go for just any old ground. The white clay soil that can be found for sale at roadside stands in the Southeast is largely kaolin, the main calcifying ingredient in Kaopectate. Packages of red clay are rich in iron oxide and aluminum oxide. Brande explains that the two chemical compounds that give red clay its color are actually produced by weathering from the breakdown of other existing minerals. “Those two compounds are fairly stable,” he says, “so they accumulate while lots of the other mineral components created by weathering decompose and wash away.”
Have seen it done by some all my life but thought I'd study the practice a little. Don't think I'll be trying it any time soon.
Here's about all I can find:
Sweet Loam Alabama
For a small percentage of Americans, soil isn’t just the medium for growing food; it’s a meal in itself. Arguably, only cultural chance has kept dirt-eating, or geophagia, from becoming more widespread. If your great-grandmother is Swedish, Japanese, Finnish, Javan, Peruvian, Mayan, or West African, she may have once heard of a good recipe for a soup or bread that featured soil as an ingredient. Religious traditions involving the ingesting of dirt span the globe. Slaves brought to the Americas from African nations continued their native practice of eating soils, and the habit was common among women during pregnancy. In some rural communities in this country, the practice still exists.
People who eat dirt are sometimes nutrient-deficient—low levels of calcium or iron, for example, can cause a person to crave chalky substances such as clay. What human bodies can extract from dirt, though, is debatable: Many of the soils that are regularly eaten are dominated by a ferrous-oxide form of iron, which is poorly absorbed by the body. But by and large, many geophages, when asked why they do it, say they simply enjoy the taste.
Geophagia is often classified as the psychiatric disease pica—the ingesting or mouthing of nonnutritive substances, which can range from soils to cigarette butts to soaps and rubber gloves. Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s character Rebecca experienced a geophagic episode as the result of love-crazed madness in One Hundred Years of Solitude: “Rebecca got up in the middle of the night and ate handfuls of earth in the garden with a suicidal drive, weeping with pain and fury, chewing tender earthworms and chipping her teeth on snail shells.”
Dirt-eaters don’t generally go for just any old ground. The white clay soil that can be found for sale at roadside stands in the Southeast is largely kaolin, the main calcifying ingredient in Kaopectate. Packages of red clay are rich in iron oxide and aluminum oxide. Brande explains that the two chemical compounds that give red clay its color are actually produced by weathering from the breakdown of other existing minerals. “Those two compounds are fairly stable,” he says, “so they accumulate while lots of the other mineral components created by weathering decompose and wash away.”