That would explain a lot, actually.
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 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.
In South Epsteinia they eat dirt. And they only season it with salt and vinegar because they’re white.
I really don’t think it was “common” up to the 80s. I remember reading about this in high school around 1970, when it was described as an old practice, uncommon and eccentric but still found among a few rural poor. I remember they used the term “sweet dirt” to describe dirt they considered edible.
Drinking acid out of cans is still super common tho.
Only because they took the drugs out.
Eat dirt all y’all!
Explains a lot
peak south USA
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.
Sometimes I scroll through, see an obvious shit post in what should not be a shit post sub. I go into the comments and they are all “yeah, it’s true (personal example)” and I feel convinced a group of shit posters are just brigading the sub for the luls.
This is one of those moments.
I can understand that.
However I grew up in the US south. My response was “Yea… that sounds about right…”
as a white Englishman, key and peele have such a knack for writing a sketch that teaches me about a culture and makes me get and laugh at the joke about something I didn’t know was a thing until I saw the sketch.
This and the “gimme that OLD school” sketch are among them.
When I first saw this skit, all I could think of was the jar of pickled pig’s feet that would get cracked open at family gatherings.
I knew some animals would “eat” dirt once in a while, but this sounds like desperate hunger to me
When I read about this practice a long time ago it was talked about more as an eccentric preference, like gum or tictacs, not a desperate means of nourisment - although it might have been driven by deficiency cravings. And what I’ve read about it didn’t mention baking, so it seems like a great way to ingest parasites.
More likely pica which is a symptom of severe iron or other nutrient deficiency.
Man that make some scenes in Yellowjacket make so much more sense…
we’re getting punked, right? this is citogenesis? someone just made it up? does anyone have a primary source??
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]
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.
Shameful we let children go hungry like this
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.
Pica is the name to Google
NYT is a reliable source.
Absolutely. Always on the right side of history.
thats why its called Humus, and not HUMMUS. eating dirt is a good way to get infections, especially parasites, like raccoon roundworm.
Can those survive the baking process?
I was baffled no one wrote here WHY anyone would do this. Here’s the answer from the article:
Researchers say those who eat dirt do not do so to satisfy hunger or to meet a biochemical urge to acquire certain metals or minerals that might be missing from the diet. Rather, they do so because the practice has been learned culturally. Links Are Traced to West Africa
Dr. Frate said dirt eating is one of the few customs surviving among some Southern blacks that can be directly traced to ancestral origins in West Africa. Dirt-eating is common among some tribes in Nigeria today.
According to his research, Dr. Frate said it was not uncommon for slave owners to put masks over the mouths of slaves to keep them from eating dirt. The owners thought the practice was a cause of death and illness among slaves, when they were more likely dying from malnutrition.
Thanks for citing this, but it still doesn’t explain why this custom has developed.
The most likely explanation is that kaolinite clay is known to reduce nausea and diarrhea.
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/public-health/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2022.893831/full
I compost and a common practice is to throw a handful of your native soil into your pile when you start it, to inoculate it with local soil bacteria. Bacteria do most of the work in an active compost pile.
I wonder if people were getting some kind of gut flora benefit from this.
I wonder this exact thing, given that soil is a living organism full of beneficial bacteria and other organic materials. The food we eat consumes it, takes what it needs, and then we do the same.
I find it also interesting that while the article claims this is a cultural thing vs. being done for heath benefits, I’d argue it became cultural because of a universal understanding of health benefits.
Now I’m not saying this is some long lost concept that is the missing key to fix all our ills, however I can see how consuming soil was an integral part of maintaining gut health and boosting immunity way before we understood how those systems work.
Yeah I don’t see an answer, but it is possible that it is chemical and not about flora, because I keep seeing “clay” mentioned specifically, instead of “soil.”
I agree that just saying “it’s cultural” is not an explanation. Cultures are not entirely arbitrary.
Depending on the composition of the soil it might also have antiparasitic properties.
Or they could be beneficial parasites, like that episode of the space show.
I can’t speak for these specific people, but I know that eating clay can absorb toxins, like the kinds of poisons plants make to stop you eating them. There’s also potentially mineral supplementation and introduction of beneficial bacteria.
But it’s not very safe to eat dirt in modern times because we’ve poisoned a lot of the soil with various substances. You can buy edible dirt which is known to be safe.
You can buy edible dirt which is known to be safe.
Wait, what?
What rational reason is there for people to eat cereal for breakfast?
Cereal was designed to prevent masturbation.
I’d say it does a pretty good job. I hardly ever jack off while eating Cheerios in the morning.
Cream of Wheat, not cream of meat.
That’s why I rub out a fat one first and THEN eat the cereal.
That’ll show kellogg
Then why are they called Apple Jacks?!
There’s always a reason, but it doesn’t need to be entirely rational. Kellogg was a nut, but that’s a different topic, no?
Yeah pour it in the trousers!
That’s true for a lot of customs.
Pretty much all customs are culturally transmitted - that’s kind of the definition. But they’re not necessarily totally arbitrary either - there is often some other information that can be added beyond “they have learned to do it.”
Oh I agree.
The cause of the cultural behavior usually has a purpose though.
The cause of the cultural behavior usually has a purpose though.
Yeah, but not necessarily one that is still relevant or even ever actually worked towards whatever goal there originally was. Cultural inertia is like that.
So it probably at some point had a purpose, but that purpose (whatever it was) might or might not apply any more or even be total nonsense.
We need to bring back sun god sacrifices, then. Maybe that’s why global warming and Stacy won’t go out with me.
In clinic, this is called pica.
Dirt is full of streptomyces species and spores. It’s why dirt smells like dirt. Those species produce most of our antibiotics.
