Admit it. You’ve eaten dirt at least once in your life.
An Associated Press story from several years ago reported that in 1942, 25 percent of Mississippi school children regularly ate dirt (probably because their school cafeterias served brussels sprouts).
The practice of eating dirt is called “geophagy” That is Latin, I believe: geo for “earth” and phagy for “it tastes fudgy.” I didn’t look that up, but it sounds right.
According to the article, the practice of geophagy dates back at least to ancient Greece and was once widespread. Some women ate dirt to satisfy nutritional cravings in pregnancy. Other people ate dirt because they thought it was good for them, it tasted good, or they didn’t have anything else to eat. Or because they were crazy.
“In 1971, it was not unusual to see women walking along, eating and sharing a bag of dirt,” one researcher said.
I’ve heard of being married to a dirt bag and having to share him with other women, but I’ve never heard of sharing a bag of dirt as if it were a bag of peanuts.
The South is known to have good sites for tasty dirt. The article said that some families sent “care packages” of dirt from the South to relatives who had moved to California and been forced into a diet of tofu, hummus and parsnips. If you’ve ever eaten a tofu, a parsnip or a hummus, you’ll understand why folks would anticipate the arrival of their monthly dirt supply.
Eating dirt doesn’t seem to hurt you much, though constipation is said to be a main side-effect, and these days you have to watch out for pesticide contamination.
I will confess that as a child I occasionally sampled a bit of dirt. But children have no food taboos. They will eat what looks or smells right to them, and nothing smelled much better than a good mud pie back in the days before we had been introduced to sacks of greasy, aromatic fastfood.
Being a curious child, I put a lot of other things in my mouth in those days too, just to test them.
Once I ate a piece of screen wire. Not enough to screen in a porch or anything, just a small square of it, and I didn’t mean to eat that. I just put it in my mouth to analyze it, and I happened to swallow.
I ate bread for three days to cushion the wire that I could picture poking a hole in my innards. Fortunately, wire isn’t constipating, and everything must have “come out” all right. I’m still here.
I also tasted crayons from time to time, magenta being my favorite flavor. And that white school paste was pretty good too, if it was fresh.
The cartoon character Bart Simpson went around telling people to “eat my shorts.” He may be on to something there. People do eat strange things in addition to dirt, like paste and crayons, ashes, chalk and paint chips. Or screen wire. The practice of eating such inappropriate materials even has a name - pica - and they’ve made TV shows about it.
Eating dirt sounds inappropriate too, but let’s be honest. If the Martians ever land here, they might find dirt to be one of the most sensible things humans consume. After all, we’re the species that eats pizza, which is super salty, greasy enough to stop up our arteries on the spot, and it smells like vomit. A visit to a pizza parlor would have a Martian scratching his head. If he had a head, of course.
Talking about inappropriate foodstuffs, humans eat crawfish! Watching Bubba sucking a crawfish head would send any Martian visitor dashing for the nearest restroom with his hand over his little mouth. If he had a mouth.
We eat chittlins, for Pete’s sake! That’s something’s intestine! And snails! Even if you call them by their fancy French name, escargots, snails are still just one step up the food chain from the dirt they ooze across to get onto my zinnias.
I’ve even produced a few things in my own kitchen that might give a Martian visitor second thoughts about the wisdom of packing humans off to their planet. One bite of my Beanie Weenie Surprise and they’d probably opt for a bag of dirt to haul back to their home cafeterias instead.
Besides, there are real advantages to eating dirt. It’s cheap, which is more than I can say for the high priced food we’re having to buy today.
Dirt is easily available. We have more dirt than grass in our yard. This aggravates my husband, but I see a great little dirt-burger entrepreneurial opportunity developing right out there in my own front yard. If soy burgers can catch on, so can dirt burgers.
Unlike our favorite snacks, Double Choco-Whammies, dirt may actually have some nutritional value in its mineral and fiber content. You wouldn’t have to take nutritional supplements!
The article’s author says that dirt eating is dying out. That’s a shame. Next they’ll be telling me that I can no longer munch on a magenta Crayola. What is this world coming to?
