I feel like there’s a decent difference between dirt and clay. Like the title made me imagine the same dirt that’s in a lawn with bugs and stuff; clay I imagine as being cleaner and more similar to eating wax or play-doh.
I mean, I drink my urine for the sulphur qualities in alchemy, which are a different thing entirely than what sulphur is in chemistry. Makes my teeth hurt less, I find. Must be good Karma in a yellow spectrum of frequencies. Don’t eat your poop though. That’s a bad idea, kids.
I’m sure there are plenty of good minerals and some vitamins in dirt… But there are also parasite eggs and bacteria like anthrax…
Born in the southern US. Great grandparents were dairy farmers in AL. Doesn’t get much more rural southern.
Asked my family about this. My granddad had heard that people existed who did this when he was a child (~1940’s-50’s?) but never saw it nor heard of it since. Nobody else had heard of it at all.
I’m sure it must’ve happened, but I don’t think it was as ubiquitous as the wording here makes it seem.
(Also learned of a family member who ate dirt as a young child, but this was despite the wishes of everyone around him 😂)
My grandmother and mother both got pica during childbirth. Grandmother ate a spoonful of dirt and was satisfied, I’d have to call mother but I think she’d just ignore the question these days.
we’re getting punked, right? this is citogenesis? someone just made it up? does anyone have a primary source??
Pica is the name to Google
I don’t have a source, but when I was younger there were a few black kids in my school from super poor families, and their parents would put sugar and spices in clay for them for breakfast. It had some flavor and filled them up, even if there wasn’t much nutritional value.
Then they finally added breakfast (instead of just lunch) to the free meal program for poor families when I was in late elementary, and they’d just eat at school.
A lot of kids only reliably get meals from school. In college, I got involved in a program with the food bank where we’d go to schools during their last period on Fridays and place backpacks full of food in the lockers of children from the poorest families. The blue bags we used were cheap and obvious, and we’d frequently find the previous week’s bag still full. The kids were too embarrassed to get on the bus with the bags that identified them as poor.
So we had a fundraiser to buy 3 cheap but normal identical backpacks for each kid in the program. One for their everyday use, and 2 for the weekend food (we’d drop off a new one and take the previous week’s bag for refilling). That way they’d swap their regular bookbag in their locker for the food bag and nothing looked unusual on the bus ride home.
I hadn’t thought about that in a while. I need to make a donation to the food bank.
Also - give the food bank money, not food. They can buy food cheaper than you can, and they know what they actually need.
Tyfys 🫡. I will need to join my local food bank as well
It had some flavor and filled them up
Ok, but why not, for example, wood, straw? Them are mostly inert and even somewhat healthy. I don’t know about clay specifically but eating pebbles exposes you to high levels of toxic minerals.
wood, straw?
Availability, ease of mastication, ease of swallowing.
If you had sawdust spices and and water you might have a decent shot, but that’s not all that easy to make without tools.
Clay, sand and soil are pretty easy to get to.
People who are soo poor they’ve resorted to eating clay to feel full may not be in a position to know the healthiest way to temporarily the body into thinking it’s not hungry.
Shameful we let children go hungry like this
Human geophagia is a form of pica – the craving and purposive consumption of non-food items – and is classified as an eating disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) if not socially or culturally appropriate.[6] Sometimes geophagy is a consequence of carrying a hookworm infection. Although its cause remains unknown, geophagy has many potential adaptive health benefits as well as negative consequences.[5][7]
NYT is a reliable source.
Absolutely. Always on the right side of history.
Monkeys on Gibraltar do it, too. To treat stomach ache when they ate unhealthy. There is an abundance of bad food for them which they steal from tourists.
Should you start eating dirt now? You shouldn’t, scientists say. Germs.
After cooking with high heat there should be no germs left. As stated in the article there are no health risks involved except if you eat such a large amount it blocks your intestines. Also even if you didn’t cook it the germs that live in soil are not the same germs that make you sick, those you get from your fellow humans.
Also even if you didn’t cook it the germs that live in soil are not the same germs that make you sick, those you get from your fellow humans.
Ya, sure, you’ve obviously never heard of gardia, tetanus, botulism, histoplasmosis, anthrax, E coli, salmonella, and the ever popular listeria. Plus you could pick up a party of parasites and worms.
Very pastoral. Very grounding. Touch grass, acquire necrotizing fasciitis.
All the ones you listed are either:
Not native to soil but may be on soil if faeces got on there Or Not dangerous in soil but will become dangerous if food gets into contact with it before fermenting Or Only dangerous getting into your blood, but not your mouth.
As long as there is no literal poop on the soil you can eat it raw. These people mentioned in the article were digging deep clay which would carry absolutely no risk of faeces contamination.
How would you know that no animal had ever crapped over the clay deposit and had rain drift in durable, long-lasting bacterial spores from the waste whiøe the rain was on its way through the clay to join the groundwater? That a burrowing critter didn’t die just upstream in the ground of where you’re digging? It’s not terribly likely that those would get you sick maybe but ‘absolutely no risk’ is a high bar to clear.
Also there can be other sorts of non-obvious contamination like if there are trace amounts of heavy metals. Kaopectate got sued by California because the clay contained in their popular anti-diarrhea pills had traces of lead, such that the adult version pills would have fifty micrograms of lead a pop or six to twelve micrograms for children. For reference California currently mandates a warning slapped on if a product exposes you to half a microgram of lead per day. It’s difficult to know the provenance and full risks of stuff dug from a hole for a regular person. Even trained people with a lot on the line sometimes screw up and get people hurt.
You are right about the risk of heavy metal contamination so wont comment on that. But if we are speaking about an animal that crapped on top of the clay pile then that should not be an issue. Soil in general but especially clay has an absolutely enormous surface area that adsorbs both bacteria and viruses. That’s why ground water is usually safe to drink but surface water is not. A large amount of faeces leaking into the soil water from above would potentially contaminate the water with nitrate which could be a slight cancer risk if consumed in large quantities but there should be no risk of getting infected if you are digging deep unexposed clay, even if an animal crapped on top of the pile. As long as there is no heavy metal contamination eating deep clay is probably safer than eating a wild picked berry.
Dig in, then. :)
That’s what surprised me; I assumed it was beneficial to the gut biome, but it’s baked dead. Maybe there’s nutritional benefit?
In Germany, clay is sold in drugstores to cure digestion issues or as mineral supply for hair and nails. I think they knew what they were doing and were shamed out of continuing.
I’ve learned about Medicinal clay from my wife. You can buy it in regular shops everywhere in Germany. She takes it dissolved in water if she has bad inflammation.
I have yet to try it.
I mean, I could see how it actually might have some positive effects. There’s all sorts of bacteria in soil. If you take a hunk of soil and bake it, any alive bacteria will be present. But even after baking, their dead forms will remain in various states of decomposition. So maybe eating dirt could act as a sort of broad-spectrum “vaccine” to certain pathogens. You’re exposing your immune system to various pathogens rendered inert by the baking process. And maybe this decreases the number or severity of infections people get.
No idea if this would actually work. But it seems vaguely plausible at least.
It’s called “Heilerde” for anyone who’s interested
When I did Ayahuasca, my mom’s friend joked that I would eat dirt with his son during the peak of the high. I didn’t do it but he actually did it. When asked about, he told me that it taste like glory.
B.S.
When I was a kid (sometime in the early 90s in Philadelphia) I remember something coming on the news about women eating dirt. I always thought about it and wondered “why was that on the news…?” (since I was a kid and wasn’t paying attention), but now I know. This was an interesting read. Thanks for sharing
Ok, but you were THERE in the early 1990s!!! That was a historic time in history! Somewhere in the same city as you, at the same time as you, someone was shootin some B-ball outside of the school. When a couple of guys who were up to no good started making trouble in your neighborhood! The kid got in one little fight, but his mom got scared, and said he was going to live with his uncle in California.
And that’s the story of how your city population shrank by 1 that day.
Are they preparing the subjects that eating dirt is “American”, and they should get used to it, as the prices are going to rise even more?
I remember reading this in a travel book from a danish author.
The person he asked about the custom was perplexed when he told him that he did not eat dirt.
Wtf
turns out that a lot of weird things exist. the world is truly a big place!
Murica!
